Taylor Swift: What her new album cover reveals

It's hard to imagine Taylor Swift with shriveled fingertips. Goddess hands can't shrivel. It's impossible that this pop superheroine, this "source of light" ("Time Magazine"), should be subject to the same bodily functions as us normal humanoids with all our structural defects. After all, we all know that in Taylor's presence, natural laws cease to apply, millions become compliant followers, and the real world gives way to a glittering alternative present.

But there she lies. In the bathtub. Her face barely sticks out of the water, reddened and damp with sweat, like anyone who bathes in too hot a bath for too long. And the fingers of her left hand actually look as if she stepped into the steaming foam of a hot tub at least two hours ago.

The foam has long since melted, the water has cooled, but Taylor Swift doesn't want to return to the cold world just yet. It's like that moment when you haven't quite pulled a sweater over your head and think: it's actually quite nice in here. Warm, dark, and peaceful.

Look, says the picture. I've toiled for you. I've worked myself to the point of exhaustion in the entertainment mine. Now I need a break. Time for myself. But you're welcome to watch. Taylor has something in common with the completely unknown Mr. Müller Lüdenscheid from Loriot's classic bathtub, who also asks: "I don't want to seem rude, but I'd really like to be alone right now."

"The Life of a Showgirl" is the name of Taylor Swift's twelfth album, due out on October 3rd. The Swiftie leader just unveiled its cover art on her friend and football star Travis Kelce's podcast. However, nothing has been heard yet. No sound. No single.

Modern marketing now follows the principles of Chinese water torture: Bite by bite, the star sends his millions of homies into a frenzy of anticipation until the internet implodes – first the album name, then the release date, then the track list and now: the cover, shot by the photographer duo Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott, with whom Taylor already worked on her album “Reputation”.

Working in the entertainment mines: Taylor Swift in 2024 at a performance as part of her "Eras" tour in Toronto, Canada.

Source: IMAGO/ZUMA Press

What we see is a weary-looking Taylor in a luxurious, crystal-encrusted corset, framed by a collage of fragments of her body and iridescent letters in the style of Disney Dust, which form the album title. An exhausted mermaid, a Las Vegas showgirl at the end of her rope. And yet, there remains an indestructible, supernatural, lascivious glamour.

The bathtub scene, with its hyper-artificial Dave Chappelle pop aesthetic, alludes to a tour ritual: Swift, as the Queen graciously informed the crowd by way of explanation, liked to immerse herself in the tub after shows in the fragrant mist to escape the madness that must be her life.

Of course, Taylor also sells herself as a sexy mermaid; after all, according to serious calculations*, 36.6 percent of the image shows bare skin. It's the most naked Taylor cover to date.

The visual model: the painting “Ophelia” by the British painter Sir John Everett Millais from 1851.

Source: imago/United Archives International

There is more than a hint of “Ophelia” surrounding the motif – the painting of the same name by the British painter John Everett Millais, which shows the tragic heroine Ophelia from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, who, having fallen prey to madness, fell into a river while picking flowers and is now drifting towards her death, her face just above the water’s surface.

Accordingly, "The Fate of Ophelia" is the title of the first of twelve new songs on the album. The other tracks are: "Elizabeth Taylor," "Opalite," "Father Figure," "Eldest Daughter," "Ruin The Friendship," "Actually Romantic," "Wi$h Li$t," "Wood," "CANCELLED!", "Honey," and the title track: "The Life Of A Showgirl" featuring Sabrina Carpenter (26), who is already emerging as the sole legitimate Swift heir.

The scientific interpretation of the succinct song titles at the TikTok University of Swiftology has long since begun: The excited community speculates that they'll likely be about family, love, friendship, entertainment, and soul-searching. Just like every Swift album. She produced the twelve songs in Sweden—there's nothing else to do—during the most successful pop tour of all time, the Eras Tour, with 149 shows, 10 million live viewers, and two billion dollars in revenue.

Loyal followers: "Swifties" queue up in front of Taylor Swift's merchandising shop in Gelsenkirchen in July 2024.

Source: Christoph Reichwein/dpa

Apparently, Taylor Swift days have 36 hours. Or maybe there are actually three of them. The musical masterminds were hit machines Max Martin and Shellback, with whom she already produced her album "1989" – featuring smash hits like "Shake It Off." Overall, the new album is supposed to be more cheerful – Ophelia or not – after Taylor's recent musical portrayal of herself as a woman in pain, a comforter, and a big sister to a mindful, sensitive, and supportive audience.

"I wanted the album to feel like my life: vibrant, electric," Taylor said on her friend Travis Kelce's podcast "New Heights." "It's about everything that happened behind the scenes—the chaos, the euphoria, real life." Travis Kelce threw confetti into the air. The man knows his role in the "Swift Circus": making the boss look good. And as long as the Swift/Kelce dream team has neither marriage nor a baby to show off, a new album is the best they can hope for.

Dream team: Travis Kelce and his Taylor Swift celebrate the Kansas City Chiefs' victory over the Buffalo Bills in January 2025.

Source: Emily Curiel/[email protected]/

A bathtub, then. Not always an easy pop motif, especially in Germany. Uwe Barschel will certainly be unfamiliar with the Swift, and yet, as a local observer of bathtub matters, it's hard to escape associations with the gruesome image of the former Minister-President of Schleswig-Holstein in a Geneva hotel bathtub.

Most of the time, however, the bathtub, as a sanctuary and self-care oasis, serves as a suitable symbol of intimacy and sensuality. After all, Marilyn Monroe once lay boisterously and very much alive in a foam-filled bathtub in a legendary photo series by Milton Greene.

Happy in the bathtub: Julia Roberts in the 1990 film “Pretty Woman”.

Source: imago images/Everett Collection

So let's put Barschel aside and instead think of positive bathtub scenes like Loriot's "Men in the Bath" or Julia Roberts loudly singing Prince's "Kiss" in a bathtub in "Pretty Woman." Or Whoopi Goldberg on Annie Leibovitz's "Vanity Fair" cover in a tub full of milk. Or the photographer Lee Miller taking a bath in Adolf Hitler's bathtub shortly after the liberation of Munich in 1945 – an image that has become an iconic triumph of life, irony, and boldness over evil. Lars Eidinger, too, once alluded to the Ophelia myth in a white dress on the cover of his hip-hop record "I'll Break Ya Legg."

How many supermodels fit in a bathtub: Naomi Campbell (l.), Christy Turlington (m.) and Linda Evangelista in 1990 after a Versace party, seen here in an exhibition in New York in 2011.

Source: imago stock&people

Taylor Swift joins the ranks of supermodels Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, and Christy Turlington, who celebrated after a Versace party at the Ritz Hotel in Paris in 1990 – photographed by Roxanne Lowit. A motif that was reinterpreted in Cannes in 2017 by Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, Joan Smalls, and Hailey Baldwin.

Taylor Swift, on the other hand, is self-sufficient. She needs no one else. The duck stays outside. She doesn't even need bathtub foam. Her foam is what her Swifties experience at her concerts and what the French sociologist Émile Durkheim once called "collective effervescence"—a shared effervescence and effervescence in communal detachment from the world.

It is the foam on which Taylor Swift rests, nestled in the world – an invisible mountain of love, from whose summit she rules the pop world with Prince Consort Travis Kelce.

*The skin analysis of the Taylor Swift album cover was performed using artificial intelligence: The image was first color-corrected using gray-world white balance to neutralize the green tint. Next, a combined skin segmentation was performed using several analysis tools. These included the YCbCr model, which separates luminance (pure pixel brightness) from the color components; an HSV filter, which further breaks down hue, saturation (S), and brightness (Value); and, as a third "skin check," an rg chromaticity ellipse to detect typical skin clusters; and a 5×5 majority filter to reduce noise, which can distinguish brighter highlights on jewelry from skin, for example, and cleans up the analysis accordingly.