Losing the Blonde

Taylor Swift on the cover of Wonderland Magazine, and I keep coming back to it.

I’m not someone who tracks celebrity style cycles. What Jennifer Lawrence does with her hair, what suit Ryan Reynolds wore to whatever event, what Kim Kardashian is presenting as her body this week—I don’t care, and I don’t think I’m supposed to. That whole apparatus exists to fill space between advertising, and I’ve long made my peace with ignoring it.

But I’m a committed advocate of female naturalness in all its forms—genuinely all of them, I mean that in the broadest possible sense—and this photograph earns a second look. Swift has stripped away the entire machine here: the country-blonde-America’s-darling packaging that generates equal measures of worship and reflexive contempt. What’s left is just someone looking back at the camera. Specific. A little strange. Present rather than performed.

The apparently universally-despised pop star turns out, when the apparatus steps back, to look like an actual person. Which is either a revelation or the most obvious thing in the world, depending on how much of your attention you’ve spent on her public image. Either way, this is the photograph I’ll remember from her.