Taylor Swift’s ‘Showgirl’ Style Asks, “Are You Not Entertained?”

“Love it,” Taylor Swift says on the set of “The Fate of Ophelia”‘s kaleidoscopic music video, playing in theaters now as part of the rollout for The Life of a Showgirl, her twelfth album. She’s watching a playback of a bit of choreography—and, unbeknownst to her, sharing her thesis for the era’s crystal-coated aesthetic. “Can I do one more to beat it?”

In the video, Swift transforms into different showgirls—or rather, performers—from throughout the ages: the model who depicts Ophelia in Sir John Everett Millais’s 1851 painting of the drowning noblewoman, wearing a white linen gown and a flowing blonde wig; a dancer at the center of a Busby Berkeley routine, complete with a shimmering, customized Area bodysuit and pailette swim cap; a cabaret star in a broken-mirror dress; a Sarah J. Maas-esque heroine at sea in a silver Paolo Sebastian gown. Finally, she appears as Taylor Swift of the 2020s: Kelsey Randall crystalline naked dress, shaggy fur jacket, catching a football at a raucous concert after-party.

This sequence comes in at just under four minutes, but it captures the same marathon energy of Swift’s 149-stop Eras Tour in its swirl of quick-changes and fast-motion evolution. Those shows, which cover her entire career and discography, were the inspiration for this album. While the lyrics of The Life of a Showgirl go, as Swift has said in interviews, “behind the curtain,” the outfits she’s wearing in the accompanying visuals are all about center-stage showgirls with a wealth of theatrical history. And the level of care behind each costume shows just how dedicated she remains to hitting her marks—and earning the audience’s applause.

Swift and her longtime stylist, Joseph Cassell Falconer, clearly did their homework for The Life of a Showgirl. The visuals have trickled out on Instagram and through vinyl variants, in addition to the “Ophelia” music video. In them, we see cinched-tight corsets by Annie’s Ibiza, The Blonds, and Guilds of Hands, referencing late-night cabaret performers. The majority of crystal-covered looks are by Bob Mackie, the designer responsible for dressing pop legends (Cher, Tina Turner, Madonna) and rising stars (Sabrina Carpenter, Zendaya)—specifically, his work for Jubilee!, the longest-running Las Vegas showgirl revue.

The set Swift wears to play a Vegas Strip dancer toward the end of her “Ophelia” video, is pulled from that production archive. Jubilee! was a project of gargantuan scale: Reportedly, dressing the hundreds-strong cast led to a global shortage in Swarovski crystals.

The dancers in Jubilee! had to move with precision and grace, not taking a step out of line for the entire, shimmering picture they made for their audiences. This type of theater is nearly extinct, as changing cultural tides have sent traditional showgirl performances packing. (Jubilee! closed in 2016.)

As Swift is contemplating her place in the pop pantheon following her retrospective tour—one that’s simply hard to beat in terms of $2 billion-plus in ticket sales and near-daily, breathless nostalgia spawned by her earlier great hits—you can understand how she might empathize with performers who used to draw crowds but are now a fading memory. “You’re only as hot as your last hit, baby,” she sings. When she dresses in the style of these showgirls, though, she’s hoping to replicate their all-out commitment to their craft—not the curtain coming down.

In her announcement post for the album, Swift also described The Life of a Showgirl as a “self portrait.” The designers she’s worn so far—and the ones she name-checked on the album—embody an always-on energy. Area, the label behind her crystalline bodysuit on the album cover, often dresses stars for events like the VMAs; The Blonds, is similarly associated with flashy fashion shows and after-parties.