Pop superstar Taylor Swift takes the cover story of Time Magazine‘s Person of the Year 2023 edition lensed by fashion photography duo Inez and Vinoodh. In charge of styling was Heidi Bivens, with production from VLM Productions. Beauty is work of hair stylist Holli Smith, makeup artist Diane Kendal, and manicurist Maki Sakamoto.
This is the proudest and happiest I’ve ever felt, and the most creatively fulfilled and free I’ve ever been. Ultimately, we can convolute it all we want, or try to overcomplicate it, but there’s only one question: Are you not entertained?
I do not leave my bed except to get food and take it back to my bed and eat it there, it’s a dream scenario. I can barely speak because I’ve been singing for three shows straight. Every time I take a step my feet go crunch, crunch, crunch from dancing in heels. I know I’m going on that stage whether I’m sick, injured, heartbroken, uncomfortable, or stressed. That’s part of my identity as a human being now. If someone buys a ticket to my show, I’m going to play it unless we have some sort of force majeure.
Every part of you that you’ve ever been, every phase you’ve ever gone through, was you working it out in that moment with the information you had available to you at the time. There’s a lot that I look back at like, ‘Wow, a couple years ago I might have cringed at this.’ You should celebrate who you are now, where you’re going, and where you’ve been.
By the time an artist is mature enough to psychologically deal with the job, they throw you out at 29, typically. In the ’90s and ’00s, it seems like the music industry just said: ‘OK, let’s take a bunch of teenagers, throw them into a fire, and watch what happens. By the time they’ve accumulated enough wisdom to do their job effectively, we’ll find new teenagers.’
Make no mistake – my career was taken away from me. You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar. That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.
Nothing is permanent. So I’m very careful to be grateful every second that I get to be doing this at this level, because I’ve had it taken away from me before. There is one thing I’ve learned: My response to anything that happens, good or bad, is to keep making things. Keep making art. But I’ve also learned there’s no point in actively trying to quote unquote defeat your enemies. Trash takes itself out every single time.
Beyoncé is the most precious gem of a person – warm and open and funny. And she’s such a great disrupter of music-industry norms. She taught every artist how to flip the table and challenge archaic business practices. There were so many stadium tours this summer, but the only ones that were compared were me and Beyoncé, clearly it’s very lucrative for the media and stan culture to pit two women against each other, even when those two artists in question refuse to participate in that discussion.
Photography by Inez and Vinoodh for TIME Magazine, read more at time.com
she is the moment!