Ok I’ve been meaning to pitch in to this for a while when I saw that the latest wave of Karlie and Taylor news articles has heated up this discussion on other platforms.
First and foremost, I’m glad that swifties have that much critical thinking that they’ve noticed that the VS Fashion show and subsequent immediate friendship felt fabricated because we all know that they were. So they can notice a fabricated narrative when they want to…(interesting!) it’s the why on which we disagree.
As OP pointed out, we know Taylor and Karlie met a good few years before all of this VSFS hard launch. The first time we know they met for sure is at the 2008 Teen Vogue Young Hollywood awards as Taylor would later confirm in an interview. This is the same night she met Emma Stone and she calls both Emma and Karlie “two of her best friends” in this interview.
And the Kaylor Vogue golden threat continues when Karlie mentions in an early 2012 Teen Vogue interview that she and Taylor spoke at the 2011 Met Gala and “joked about a baking date”.
Baking date, I bet 😏. Sparks were definitely already flying there. And notice how they’re yet again keeping it deliberately vague with Karlie saying they were introduced at the Met Gala when we know Bevan introduced them in 2008.
Taylor’s iconic Feb 2012 Vogue cover and interview were shot in September 2011, when Taylor sat next to Anna Wintour at a show Karlie walked in before she then went on to mentioned Karlie in her interview (“I want to bake cookies with her”) I’m starting to think they either had a lot of baking dates or cookies are a euphemism here… 🫣. Anyway, Karlie of course, reacts to the cover with her iconic “Your kitchen or mine” tweet when the issue is released in January 2012. That is such a come on, you cannot tell me anybody would shoot their shot so publicly if they weren’t already hooking up by then…
We then had the 2012 summer of Swiftgron which I’m not denying or erasing, but by September 2012 Taylor was shooting the Begin Again music video in Paris at the same time as Karlie was walking in shows there and with very obvious references to Karlie in the video (11 EZK 92 number plate, love lock bridge). Someone also pointed out that this is when she wrote This Love according to the published diaries, so I recon this is when they officially started dating. We then have no further public interaction even though they both attend the 2013 Met Gala until the VSFS in November and boom, best friends!
So, why the meet cute story/friendship hard launch if they clearly knew each other pretty well already? Well, if you still want to believe this was just for PR to shake the serial dater image, then be my guest. But given the heavy flirtation leading up to it and the Beginning Again mv, I’d say they were a pretty solid couple by then and this was their introduction to being seen together every day. Taylor bought her NYC apartment in February 2014 and Karlie was living there by the summer which would be incredibly fast moving (even for a sapphic couple lol) if they weren’t already dating for a while.
(I’d also have questions about how two closeted celebrity women would benefit from an incredibly homoerotic ‘bearding friendship’ but I won’t go into that… it makes no sense though.) Two things can be true though, and I won’t deny that the supposed single era of female friendships was pushing a new narrative to erase some of that boy crazy image. But it clearly didn’t work very well, and cost Taylor quite a few relatability points to suddenly have lots of hot rich supermodel friends. Almost like the main aim wasn’t an image change, but just Taylor moving across the country to end long distance and move in with her gf whilst they’re both still in the closet. But honestly, make of it what you will, but maybe apply that same criticality to other situations as well.
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