Taylor Swift's Time Cover Slammed in Viral Post

Taylor Swift's new Time magazine cover has been criticized in a viral social media post that has deemed the shoot the "photographic equivalent of a saltine cracker."

On Wednesday, Swift was named Time's "Person of the Year." She was one of a group of nine finalists that included Barbie, King Charles III, OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Swift, who turns 34 on December 13, dominated national and global headlines in 2023. She embarked on her wildly popular Eras Tour, which is projected to become the biggest tour of all time and the first to gross over a billion dollars. The tour has had profound economic effects on numerous cities and towns that saw mini booms during her tour stops, and even the U.S. economy as a whole has benefited.

Ten college classes have been devoted to Swift, according to Time, and there's been a huge increase in football viewership as a result of her relationship with the Kansas City Chiefs' Travis Kelce.

"This is the proudest and happiest I've ever felt, and the most creatively fulfilled and free I've ever been," Swift told Time of her honor.

However, while fans have celebrated Swift's year being capped with the coveted title, the accompanying cover shoot, captured by Dutch duo Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, has been portrayed as doing a disservice to the singer.

One image showed Swift wearing a denim shirt under a jacket and over a cream rollneck sweater as she gazed upward. Set against a gray background, the close-up image showed the star sporting a pop of red lipstick.

In a post that has been viewed more than 12 million times, one person on X, formerly Twitter, said in their critique of the photo: "I work on the photo team of a similarly large media company and let me just say this shoot has not been deemed a success."

In a subsequent thread, the X user highlighted another picture that showed Swift sporting a black bodysuit with her cat Benjamin Button draped over her shoulders.

The X user described the picture as the "10000th boring grey background," with "terrible hairstyling" and "flat lighting" that was "completely derivative of Annie Leibovitz's portrait of [Leonardo] DiCaprio with swan but executed terribly."

Another image critiqued by the X user showed Swift in an embellished pewter gown while posing with her arms above her head.

The photo, they surmised, was "obviously positing [Swift] as Marilyn Monroe derivative of her shoots with [photographer Richard] Avedon except those photos are mainly sad. Arms retouched to f****** hell and back but still the brightest most eye grabbing thing in the photo. Just poorly executed really."

Returning their attention to the first image, the X user said "it just reeks of the corporate client over involving themselves in a high profile shoot and stripping all style from the image to avoid risk until you end up with the photographic equivalent of a saltine cracker."

"I feel confident that [photographer] Alisdair McLellan's covers for i-D, [The] Gentlewoman and AnOther were the reference images and were watered down by corporate involvement until they ended up like that," they added. "[Even] the portrait is a boring version of [McLellan's] own artist portrait."

Ultimately, the X user said, Time "is a journalistic mag and the creative of this shoot feels like photojournalists tried to shoot fashion but don't have the nuance to understand the stylistic choices that make that work interesting. So it feels low production value and kinda cheap."

They added that "when you do shoots like this you relinquish a lot of control of your image to the client which I think is what caused this. Not [the photographers'] fault, they're quite amazing."

Newsweek has contacted representatives of Time and Inez and Vinoodh via email for comment.

Revered duo Inez and Vinoodh told Time that Swift's cat photo was inspired by the photographer Bill Hayward's 1970s book Cat People—which features images of a range of people, including entertainers, with their pets.

"I got a vintage copy of it for Taylor because I know she's a major cat lover, and her cats travel with her," Inez said. "And I said, 'You know, I've always wanted to do a picture like the one that's on the cover of that book where the cat's on the shoulder of the girl.'

"It speaks to a sense of carrying everything on your shoulders but being defiant while doing so. And she agreed and that's how that picture happened."

Addressing the final product, Inez said that the image "really has everything: Her glamor, her power, her sense of empathy of carrying the whole world on her shoulders. Because if you do feel like that—she's so involved in everything, whether it's getting young people to vote, etc.—she's always pushing for things that are outside of the music realm.

"I felt that there is something there in her body position that's very powerful and strong. Her expression and the way she looks has this old Hollywood glamor but underneath, there's so much power in her stance. The way she has Benjamin on her shoulders is kind of like, 'Yeah, I'm carrying you all.'"

Swift holds the honor of being the first musician to have been named Time's Person of the Year. As was noted by the magazine, her influence goes well beyond her music.

On September 19, National Voter Registration Day, the singer took to Instagram to share a message urging her fans to register on the nonpartisan, nonprofit Vote.org. According to the organization, Swift's post was followed by a surge of more than 35,000 registrations—an almost 25 percent increase over the same day last year.

Per NPR, Andrea Hailey, the CEO of Vote.org, said in a statement that the single-day surge in registrations was a "highly encouraging sign of voter enthusiasm," particularly as there was a 115 percent spike over 2022 in newly eligible 18 year olds registering to vote.