We’re calling it Orange Theory, Taylor’s Version. Last night, Taylor Swift announced that her 12th studio album is on the way—and it appears that the record, titled The Life of a Showgirl, will be associated with the color orange.
For those who aren’t familiar, each of Swift’s albums-slash-eras has had a color: Midnights was dark blue; her edgy comeback album, Reputation, was black; Lover was pastel pink, and so on. A few of the Easter eggs that pointed to orange as The Life of a Showgirl’s dedicated hue? Swift has swapped her classic red lipstick for a terracotta color, and the announcement video’s overlay text was in a bright, traffic cone-like shade.
“Taylor’s first prominent use of orange was in the music video for ‘Look What You Made Me Do,’” says Elizabeth Vlossak, an associate professor of history and associate dean of humanities at Brock University in Ontario, who taught a course called “A Swift History” earlier this year. “There is a scene in which she is locked in a giant golden birdcage, swinging on a trapeze, dressed entirely in orange. Now that we know that TS12 is entitled The Life of a Showgirl, this scene seems to hold even greater meaning.”
Vlossak adds that there were bits of orange sprinkled throughout the Eras Tour (like the orange suit set for Lover and the orange dress for the acoustic Folklore/Evermore set)—but the closer that Swift came to the end of her 149-show tour, the more the shade appeared in her wardrobe. “Fans began to notice that an orange door appeared on the screen behind Taylor and her dancers during the ‘Karma’ finale, which fueled speculation that the tour marked the end of an era and the next one was orange. The official Eras Tour Book also included a lot of orange, hinting that this color would be associated with the next album, with the final page stating, ‘see you in the next era.’”
Swift, of course, is hardly the first creative to go all-in on orange. In the late 1950s, abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko entered his own orange era, contrasting great swaths of tangerine and pumpkin-colored paint with shades of red and purple on his canvases. According to art historians Margaret C. Conrads and Steven Zucker, 1960’s No. 210/No. 211 (Orange), one of Rothko’s most famous works from the period, reflected a broader moment of societal transition: “1960 was poised between the post-World War II era that confronted questions about humanity’s brutality and the dawning era of the Civil Rights movement,” they have written. “It is possible the color choices are meant to reflect that.” In the fashion world, meanwhile, orange really only means one thing: Hermès. “The brand is synonymous with orange,” says Laird Borrelli-Persson, Vogue’s archive editor. “It even has its very own shade of the color, Orange H.” Over the years, Hermès has applied the color to everything from nail polish and lipstick to eyeliner.
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