Several Taylor Swift fans are convinced that the pop star’s Life of a Showgirl cover art subtly referenced Blake Lively amid their lingering drama.
A handful of Swifties recently pointed out that the cover of the “It’s Rapturous” CD features Swift, 35, wearing a pink diamond bangle that looks like one Lively, 38, has previously worn.
Lively wore a custom chunky diamond bracelet by Lorraine Schwartz to the London premiere of It Ends With Us in August 2023. Swift appeared to wear a similar piece of jewelry, with extra silver beads between the pink ones, for the album photoshoot.
Of course, it’s not known whether the blinged-out bauble was meant to be a reference to Lively. Both women have their own relationships with legendary jeweler Schwartz, often wearing her pieces on red carpets and beyond.
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Swift released her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, on Friday, October 3, and fans have been frantically working to deduce meanings of each and every track. (Swift famously does not mention any of her lyrical muses by name.)
“There are definitely some theories that are based in absolutely nothing close to reality,” Swift said on a Friday broadcast of Elvis Duran’s iHeartRadio show. “But, you know what? There are some that are so fun when they figure them out.”
She continued, “Just yesterday somebody figured out that if you line up the titles of all the tracks of this album in order … in the center of the frame, the shape of the track list makes the same shape as the Eras Tour stage. That was a real one [and] took a while for them to discover. Finally, they figured it out, and it was really fun.”
Swift, however, did not reveal whether Lively, who did drop a “like” on the singer’s Instagram post celebrating the album release, was a source of musical inspiration.
Swift and Lively had been friends since 2016, though their bond allegedly fractured by 2024. Us Weekly previously confirmed that the two women were seldom speaking after Swift was brought into Lively’s ongoing legal battle with Justin Baldoni.
Lively named her It Ends With Us costar and director in a sexual harassment lawsuit in late 2024. Baldoni, 41, who denied Lively’s claims, later attempted to subpoena Swift and alleged that the Grammy winner was involved in Lively’s reported attempts to cease control of the film. Swift vehemently denied any involvement in the production.
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“Taylor Swift never set foot on the set of this movie, she was not involved in any casting or creative decisions, she did not score the film, she never saw an edit or made any notes on the film,” a rep for Swift told Us Weekly in a May statement. “She did not even see It Ends With Us until weeks after its public release, and was traveling around the globe during 2023 and 2024 headlining the biggest tour in history.”
While Swift performed the European leg of her Eras Tour throughout 2024, she wrote Showgirl with producers Max Martin and Shellback. A handful of fans claimed that “Cancelled!” was penned about her falling-out with Lively.
“Did you girlboss too close to the sun? / Did they catch you having far too much fun?” Swift sings. “Come with me, when they see us, they’ll run / Something wicked this way comes / Good thing I like my friends cancelled / I like ’em cloaked in Gucci and in scandal.”
Swift has only said that “Cancelled!” was a “tongue in cheek glimpse at social outrage.”
“You can feel cancelled by any sort of social backlash that you get. I’ve been through a lot of discussion about everything that happens in my life and everything that I do and everything I say,” Swift said during her “Release Party of a Showgirl” screening. “So, anytime that people get backlash, I tend to be the person they reach out to. I wanted to write a song about how you can become wiser for it and you can become sharper, and I definitely judge people a lot less [now] that I’ve been under the microscope for so long.”
She concluded, “I just judge people based on who I know them to be [and] their actions, not some general consensus where people are like, ‘Step away, they’re radioactive!’ I’m not going to do that. I’m going to do that if someone proves they’re not a good person.”
The Life of a Showgirl is out now.
