Taylor Swift is a Beanie Baby

Every couple of years or so, we get a new cultural Beanie Baby. Labubus: Beanie Baby. NFTs: Beanie Baby. Cabbage Patch Kids, Tamagotchis, Furbies: pre-Beanie Baby Beanie Babies. Taylor Swift: Beanie Baby. An enduring, human one, but Beanie Baby nonetheless. I know what you might be thinking on that last one, but hear me out.

The answer to the question, “Is this peak Taylor Swift?” has been no for years. The limit, miraculously and perpetually, does not exist. The law of fads is that they fade. Celebrities eventually fall from grace or find themselves on the receiving end of backlash, especially the female ones — just look at Katy Perry‘s recent woes or Jennifer Lawrence, or even all the way back to Elizabeth Taylor. But not the 35-year-old Swift. Just when you think something finally has to give, it doesn’t.

Swift has been able to transform herself into a collector’s item. She’s a person, but also a product. She’s commodified everything about herself, with the help of her marketing team and fans. Just like kids wanted the Princess Diana bear, Pinchers the Lobster, and Chocolate the Moose in the ’90s, Swifties today have a voracious appetite for her vinyl records, cassettes, merch, shows, and every crumb she leaves on social media. Our identities are so wrapped up in consumerism that to love Taylor Swift is to buy Taylor Swift, or at least, a piece of her, and those little pieces add up. The woman is worth $1.6 billion. She’s an economy of her own — and one that, thus far, isn’t going out of style.

Swift gives a lot of herself. She regularly releases new music, and when the music itself isn’t new, she releases new formats of her music — a special album cover, an extra song, etc. She’s one of the many artists who feel like they have to constantly produce in the age of Spotify and TikTok, to be a never-ending stream of content. What’s unique about Swift isn’t just the pace and volume at which she puts things out, but also the manner in which she manages to hold things back at the same time. She’s widely available and in short supply.

“It’s almost like a cat-and-mouse game,” says Sally Theran, a psychologist at Wellesley College.

Swift manages to foster a sense of scarcity even when, musically, there’s nothing scarce about her. Ahead of the October release of her coming album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” she’s been dropping special vinyl releases that are available for purchase for only 48 hours. It’s part of her regular limited-time-offer playbook, where she trickles out merchandise that can be acquired only at set times and, sometimes, in set places. It’s similar to what the founder of Beanie Babies, Ty Warner, did with his toys — he’d “retire” them at random to drum up interest and send people rushing to stores. The tactics spark the thrill of the chase, the excitement of grabbing onto something that, while perhaps contrived, is hard to get.

Swift leaves “easter eggs,” subtle hints and secret messages, for fans to keep them constantly guessing, even if their guesses are often incorrect and borderline conspiratorial. People go about collecting various album releases and merch drops piece by piece, like in Monopoly or Pokémon, or plush toys. The physical acquisitions of merchandise and the Instagram and Snapchat posts that they’re at the Eras tour help fans prove their bona fides to other Swifties and show their dedication.

The Taylor Swift fandom is a gamified endeavor born out of millions of widespread parasocial relationships with followers across the globe. Parasocial relationships mean they’re one-sided: Swift’s fans have a connection with her; she does not with them. And they express that affection through consumerism, which renders Swift a commercial product.

“Because of this combination of emotional attachment through the intentional stoking of the parasocial relationship and connection, you also have this dehumanization that comes up at the same time because people feel this genuine emotional response to her, absent any depth to back it up,” says Janelle Peifer, a psychologist at the University of Richmond. “It becomes following or collecting an object.”

Maybe Swift’s real scarcity is in her staying power.

The thing about Taylor Swift is that nobody knows Taylor Swift except her family, now Travis Kelce, and her business and social circles. The era of social media just makes people feel like they do. Parasocial relationships with celebrities have existed for a long time. In the 1950s, even the staid newscaster Walter Cronkite made people feel like he was a calming uncle. But Cronkite wasn’t posting his vacation pics on Instagram or leaving countdown clocks to his next broadcast. Michael Jackson and the Beatles may have had the same or even greater levels of fervor around them, but they also maintained a layer of remove.

“We feel like we get these peeks behind the scenes that we never really got before,” says Bradley Bond, a communications professor at the University of San Diego. “And so it only makes sense that we then have significantly intensified our feelings of connectedness to these individuals. They feel more authentic and real.”

Swift also hit before the streaming era, during the last gasp of monoculture, before tech platforms siloed music fans off. “She broke in a time when things were a little bit more ubiquitous,” says Jarred Arfa, the head of global music at Independent Artist Group. “If there was a hit in the early 2000s, everybody still knew it. If there’s a hit now, chances are, if you don’t listen to that style of music, you don’t know it.”

What makes Swift unique, beyond her fame and stature, is that she presents as highly benign. No offense to arguably the biggest celebrity in the world, but a lot about her is generic. Her music is fine. Her voice is fine. Her dancing is … passable. Her forays into politics are fairly uncontroversial stuff. She’s not risqué. It makes her relatable. It also makes it possible for fans to project whatever they want onto her in a sense, because she’s such a blank slate (sorry, sorry).

“She’s not someone who has such a strong personality that people have a really strong negative reaction to her,” Theran says.

Celebrities’ fall from grace often comes when they violate some sort of expectation of them. An in-control pop prince gets a DWI charge, or a smiling talk show host is reported to be mean to staff. Swift has managed to avoid that. Does she get criticism for sucking money out of her fans? Yes. But she also gets headlines for giving bonuses to her Eras Tour truck drivers.

“With celebrity, we fill in the blanks with our ideal, so we kind of create this self-fulfilling prophecy type of thing where things we don’t know we’re going to idealize,” Bond says. “Since very few of us will ever actually have an intimate moment with Taylor Swift where she might be able to violate our expectations, without that expectancy violation, then we are able to maintain that sense of a strong connection.”

In a sense, Swift becomes like Barbie. She can be a pilot, an astronaut, a babysitter, or whatever a couple of little girls made up that day. It’s a bit like ’90s kids with Beanie Babies concocting realities for their toy friends.

“She manages to be endearing and charismatic and accessible and engaging, and she kind of hooks you in. And the easter eggs are genius, because it’s a payoff for her fans who are the most loyal,” Theran says. “It makes them feel special, and so we all want to feel special.”

To be famous nowadays, people almost can’t do one thing. Concert tours are no longer a singer with a guitar onstage —they’re enormous productions accompanied by giant marketing apparatuses and endless promotion. That’s why they’re so expensive. Actors, athletes, models, and talk show hosts are, at some level, advertisers. Swift is an advertiser, too, though largely for herself. Stars have to constantly give people things to buy, to think, talk, and brag about.

Many trends and bubbles don’t entirely follow logic. Why Labubus took off when some other ugly plush toy didn’t isn’t really explicable. The same goes for Stanley cups overshadowing, I don’t know, a nice water glass. Swift, like Beanie Babies, falls into this category. It makes sense that she’s reached these heights, but it also doesn’t.

“You’re taking an object that makes no sense to have the level of fervor associated with it, but it has been made meaningful by groupthink, by mass groups of people focusing on, and the marketing campaign that continues to feed that,” Peifer says.

Swift is the capitalist gift that keeps on giving. She is, rightly, making money off of herself, as is her fiancé and seemingly every brand known to man when they jump on Swift-related news. Just look at all the buzz around her engagement. Tons of companies tried to capitalize on it to do Taylor-and-Travis-related promos and content. My own outlet has published more than a dozen articles about it. Here I am, writing about her now.

“It’s almost that you’re in the minority if you’re not hopping onto it,” says Leslie Fogel, a senior vice president of entertainment and marketing at Zeno Group, a communications firm. “The brand bubble around this may burst eventually, but I don’t know when that’s going to be.”

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past couple of years wondering when the Taylor Swift bubble might pop. To be clear, I’m a fan — a country-music-loving friend turned me on to her when we were in high school. But all the rules of modern capitalism, celebrity, and trends indicate that what goes up must eventually come down, or maybe just cool off. And yet, Swift’s bubble keeps inflating. She constantly reissues herself, in new colors and themes. And her fans keep buying into it.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

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