“Fortnight” Music Video
Worn On: 4/19/24 // "Fornight" music video
the commentary
There’s so much to dissect in Tortured Poets and beyond into the new visuals for the “Fortnight” music video. Those thoughts, of course, to come. But off the top it feels apt to note the striking modernization of Victorian fashion on display with this piece, particularly of poet Emily Dickinson (Taylor’s distant cousin - genealogy is wild). While Dickinson herself wore a lot of white (which as we’ve seen is TTPD’s assigned eras colour), there’s something to be said here about the similarity it strikes with the custom Teuta Matoshi dresses her backup dancers wear during “my tears ricochet” on the Eras Tour as they march behind her in a funeral procession. Equally, it calls to mind the somber wear of Victorian mourning clothes - widows would often wear black for two years.
This particular piece comes from Unttld’s Fall 2021 collection, noted by the designer as a fulfillment of “19th century fantasy”.
In authentic Victorian fashion, this black ensemble Taylor wore was actually separates and not a dress. Her waxed denim jacket was by Unttld and this ruffled skirt by Elena Valez from her Fall 2024 collection which only debuted this past February.
Elena told Laird Borrelli-Persson for Vogue that her “purest objective as a brand is to really bring a lost Midwestern woman back to the American cultural narrative.” Her desires in this collection were to bring a “more multi-dimensional representation of womanhood, good and bad; one that accepts the difficult, complicated, ugly truth of being a woman as part of the beauty that makes us whole and complete and 360. It’s a character journey that sometimes goes through an antagonist journey, but ultimately resolves itself with meaning and goodwill.” I frankly can’t think of a better ethos to match an album that centers much of its narrative on Taylor exposing wounds many of which she describes as “self-inflicted.”
It’s my suspicion that TTPD is not an album that will be, nor was designed with the intention of, understood or liked by the masses. To my ears (and still overwhelmed brain feeling like I’ve absorbed an encyclopedia of words across these 31 songs) this is an album for ‘Swiftie scholars’ who have the time, space, and devotion to wade through the heaviness of an album this dense and complicated. And that’s okay! When Taylor described this album as one that she needed to make, now that we have it I interpret her meaning as her willfully confronting and hurdling over the elephant in the studio with her. Addressing the “how did it end?” questions that will plague her as soon as possible and structuring it in an album messy, complicated, and strewn with all her most vicious thoughts about the last year of her life in order to get out from under the weighted blanket of those expectations, clearing a path for her next LP to be constructed in clearer air.
the clothes
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