Style is the third song on 1989, and it introduces all of the images carried over from Treacherous, images that will haunt the rest of the album: late night drives, a man who can’t decide what he wants, wanting him anyway, the idea that it has to be all or nothing between them, burning flames / or paradise.
If Treacherous was the sexiest song on Red, Style is a strong contender for that title on 1989. She’s still very careful about it: the lights are off, he’s taking off his—I mean, I literally held my breath. (It’s a coat. That’s the next word. Still, though, you know what it feels like in that room: you walk in and stand in the darkness, and he takes of his coat, because he knows he’s going to stay, and you don’t turn on the lights, because you know you’re just going to turn them off again.)
Then there’s the chorus, with its good girl faith / and a tight little skirt. On Red this was you keep my old scarf from that very first week / ‘cause it reminds you of innocence, and it smells like me. That song, All Too Well, is vicious. He keeps things he won’t give back. Innocence is something you dirty up and ruin, or lose entirely. Style, on the other hand, is triumphant; by now Taylor knows she’s a classic.
That’s her word, classic. The chorus comes off like a chant, or a taunt: you’ve got that James Dean daydream look in your eye / and I’ve got that red-lipped classic thing that you like. It’s the pop song equivalent of a late night phone call, not quite asking him to come over, yet, just saying: god, remember how good we looked together? I miss looking at you almost as much as I miss the way you looked at me.
It’s also fascinating to see Taylor deliberately sexualizing her particular, demure aesthetic— the descriptors tight, little are usually deployed in filthier contexts when describing a young woman. Here, paired with good girl faith, it’s a little bit naughty schoolgirl: I should just tell you to leave, mister, but, oh, I won’t.
Taylor has talked about the idea that she’s not sexy, and it’s one of those things that, like the idea of her as a put-upon outsider, is both totally understandable and very hard to swallow. Like, yes, she’s clearly a goofy dancer and a little bit of a dork, but she’s also a very beautiful ninety pound blonde; whether she acts like what we all understand as “sexy,” she’s got long legs and miles of a head start on the rest of us to begin with. Either way, what she means is that she doesn’t perform her own sexuality very often. Red suggested sex but never addressed the particulars; 1989 is a little bit more debauched, but again, the sex that’s being intimated is between two people, and not a matter of Taylor’s self-presentation looking outwards, at us.
Except, that is, in Style. It’s not sexy so much as… I can’t… I’m sorry, it is, it’s sext-y. Its suggestiveness is visual and specific, a snapshot of a body, an outfit, a message you send that says I want you but also I know you want me, too. Not even just I know you want me, but also and how. Sexting allows you to construct an image of yourself and offer it up for consumption; it’s both aesthetic and intimate. It’s actually not a bad metaphor for what she does over and over again on this album, trying on different personas and voices from song to song, as if asking first herself and then the rest of us: like this? Like this? Do you like this?
Welcome to New York is a Taylor Swift Walking Photo and Blank Space is Taylor as Your Nightmare Ex. They are both direct responses to the media and the public, and their impersonal, impenetrable gaze. Style is the first glimpse on the album of her playing a character she’s choosing for herself, and performing for her own reasons, aiming directly, specifically at an audience of one.