In the Clip «Anti-Heroes», Taylor Swift poked fun at her fans for looking everywhere for Easter eggs (and herself for leaving them). In the «Bejeweled» video, she stuffed every scene with it. The new «Lavender Haze» video sits somewhere in the middle, existing mostly behind a purple smokescreen in one of its most alluring visuals yet.
«The Lavender Haze video is out now. There’s a lot of lavender. There’s a lot of haze. There’s my amazing costar [Laith Ashley] who I absolutely loved working with,” Swift shared on social media when the video was released. «This was the first video I wrote of the 3 that were released, and this one really helped me conceptualize the world and vibe of Midnightslike a sultry, insomniac dream of 70s fever. Hope you like it.»
The video is characterized by a classic Swiftian visual metaphor (a literal gray cloud hangs over her head as she sings about how her lover doesn’t really «read my melancholy»). She blows a cloud of lavender smoke in the shape of a clock striking midnight; she bathes seductively in a pool of lavender; she’s enjoying her cosmic love bubble as partygoers chat and dance around her.
A certain subset of fans will point out, quite rightly, that lavender has long association with homosexualityalthough aside from its trans co-star, this video has far fewer nods to the LGBTQ+ community than the manna that was»You need to calm down, you need to calm down.” (Swift has previously said that it lifted the term «lavender mist» by Mad Men.) Other fans are on the lookout for signs pointing to Speak Now (Taylor Version) being the next version of Swift. Space-gliding koi fish, for example, may point to a she played the guitar on the Speak Now tour, and even the color purple is associated with her third album.
More than anything else, the Easter eggs in this video refer to the Midnights album himself. There is an incense stick for «Bordeaux» and a vinyl record bearing the inscription «Brain(the constellations on the cover correspond to Sagittarius and Pisces, apparently the astrological signs of Swift and her longtime boyfriend Joe Alwyn). The weather report can be a subtle reference to «midnight rain‘, while the video’s love interest pops up when the TV weatherman remembers the lyrics ‘Karma is the on-screen guy who comes straight to my house’ fromKarma.”
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It is the continuation of Swift’s work which becomes a closed loop where everything is a reference to itself. Although for an artist whose visuals tend towards romance and fantasy, «sensual» is indeed a departure from the norm. Perhaps a new Taylor Swift evolution is on the horizon.