She Knew Exactly What She Was Doing

Taylor Swift’s I Knew You Were Trouble arrived in late 2012 as evidence of a deliberate image pivot—or maybe just a young woman getting tired of being wholesome. Messy hair, fishnets, a dubstep drop that lands somewhere between bold and clinical, a music video that puts her on the floor of a festival in ruins. The production by Max Martin and Shellback is immaculate, which makes the apparent chaos feel precisely engineered. It was. That’s what makes it interesting. The trouble was always the point.