Three months since she dropped music videos for ‘Anti-Hero’ and ‘Bejeweled’, American musician Taylor Swift has followed them up a third offering ‘Lavender Haze’.
‘Lavender Haze’ is taken from her latest album Midnights (2022).
The multi-Grammy-winner reunited with London-based director of photography Rina Yang, editor Chancler Haynes and visual effects studio Parliament. Self-written and self-directed, the airy music video, according to her Instagram post, encapsulates a “sultry sleepless 70’s fever dream”. The short film also features her co-star Laith Ashley De La Cruz, an American model of Dominican descent.
The music video employs elements of magic realism to draw a spotlight on the dominant theme of the song and Taylor’s intention of recreating a dream setting. From Swift tracing a lavender-starred cosmos across her lover’s back to plumes of lavender smoke rolling from under the bed, the song’s title is heavy in the fantastic magic system. The theme of lavender is further alluded to in scenes of Swift in a bedroom with growing lavender plants and in her finding an aquarium made up of lavender fish floating in space.’
The realist portions of the song are exotic and are sandwiched between the fantastic phases of the video. Such moments come when the Bad Blood hitmaker sings in a lavender-coloured pool of water and when she dances and whips her hair with her co-star in thick clouds of lavender haze.
As with most dreams that hardly make sense to the conscious mind, the visuals of ‘Lavender Haze’ mirror surrealism. Coupled with the soothing and love-inspiring effect of lavender as a colour, the stage is set for fairy land-like worldbuilding, a place of wild dancing, sultry love, and unreal possibilities. All these are features in the music video.
Cinematographer Yang’s touch is evident in the soft lighting and camera angles that create a layer of light so thin that it looks like coloured fluid within a transparent skin rather than a hair-thin veil. Put next to each other, the fantasy elements and the realist depiction of emotion birth a motion picture that deftly straddles the line between imagination and reality. With Swift’s clear-sighted vision and Parliament’s surrealistic visual effects, the stunning visuals of ‘Lavender Haze’ extract the best parts of dreams and love and funnel it into three-minute-and-thirty-second eye candy.
Watch ‘Lavender Haze’ here
