Many think Taylor Swift is just another pop star with millions of fans. In actuality, she is a smart, outside-the-box thinker who loves to give her fans scavenger hunts to find out about some of her current projects. Swift has included Easter eggs in her marketing since she was 15 years old, while putting together her first album. Easter eggs are small hints as to what she has planned for the future.
Some of Swift’s Easter eggs have been incredibly cryptic and challenging to discover. However, others are cleverly hidden in plain sight, waiting for the keen-eyed fans to stumble upon them, sparking a sense of intrigue and curiosity.
Grammy’s Easter eggs
Another way to look for Easter eggs is in her outfits in her music videos or her appearances in award shows such as the Grammy’s or the Golden Globes. In the 2024 Grammys, Swift showed up in a dramatic white gown with black gloves. She also wore black and white jewelry and a clock choker around her neck. Many fans were intrigued by her choker specifically, since It displayed the time of two o’clock. A time we later found out is related to her eleventh studio album; The Tortured Poets Department: The anthology which was released at 2:00 am. This was a double album with fifteen more songs than her fans expected.
Music Videos
Knowing what kind of Easter eggs Swift has hidden in the past can be incredibly helpful in knowing what to look for in the future. In an interview, Swift revealed her favorite method of incorporating Easter eggs was through her music videos. She deliberately uses different elements such as clothing, clocks, and even nail polish to send her fans on a delightful nostalgia-filled scavenger hunt. These Easter eggs are often hidden in clocks, set to specific times that could hint at a new album or something as simple as her lucky number, 13. Music videos like “Our Song” and “Call It What You Want” feature 13-second intros, as well as “The Lucky One” and “Red”.
In Swift’s music video, Out Of The Woods, there are many references to her ex-boyfriend, Harry Styles. For one, she wears a dress which resembles the blue dress she was wearing in a paparazzi photo taken after their last fight. Another reference to what she was wearing, one clip showed Swift ripping a paper airplane necklace from her neck and throwing it off a cliff. Contrary to some people’s beliefs, this was no coincidence. During the relationship, Swift was seen wearing a similar paper airplane necklace, which was believed by some fans to be a gift from Styles. Ripping it off in the music video could have been a remark about her final despair of breaking up with Styles.
Music videos from the album “Reputation” are some of the most intricate and detailed. In an interview, Swift said her music video, Look What You Made Me Do, has thousands of Easter eggs and “literally the whole video is just one big Easter egg.” In the music video, Out of the Woods, in an opening scene, “zombie Taylor” is wearing the same blue dress she wore in the Look What You Made Me Do video. As “zombie Taylor”, during the lyric “Don’t like your tilted stage,” Swift is seen tilting a gravestone into an upright position, referencing Kanye West’s tilted stage in his Saint Pablo tour in 2017. In Swift’s bathtub full of diamonds, a single dollar bill can be seen. The single dollar bill symbolizes her court case against DJ David Mueller, in which she sued him for a single dollar. Leading up to Swift sitting on her golden throne, there are noticeably many snakes, which are references to Kim Kardashian and Kanye West being referred to by the Swiftie community as ‘snakes’. During the scenes where Swift is sitting on a golden throne, she is seen holding a cup of tea, referencing Kim Kardashian “spilling the tea” with their fake phone call. During the clips with Swift and other dancers, as they are dancing, the dancers take off their jackets, revealing their “I heart TS” shirts. These shirts are a mention of Tom Hiddleston wearing a similar “I heart TS” shirt while they were dating. Toward the end of the music video, fourteen versions representing different stages of Swift’s life can be seen bickering and saying things about Swift that had been said to her by haters in the past.
