Oct 10, 2018
A removed dress as the song’s central image comes with its own significance for Swift: She’s used her dresses as a metonymic stand-in for her entire image since debut single “Tim McGraw” (“When you think happiness/ I hope you think that little black dress”), right up to 1989’s “Wildest Dreams” (“Say you’ll remember me/ Standing in a nice dress”). “I only bought this dress so you could take it off” isn’t as obvious a sledgehammer to her former self as “The old Taylor can’t come to the phone,” but it still feels more like skin-shedding than clothes-shedding. Billboard, 11/10/17
