What Does It Mean That Karlie Kloss Wore Gold to Taylor Swift’s Wedding?
Karlie Kloss arrived at Taylor Swift‘s wedding in a gold dress.
For most guests, the color would register as nothing more than a styling choice. For a subset of Swift’s fanbase, it read as a signal. Those fans have long speculated that the friendship between the two women — and the estrangement that followed — amounted to more than a platonic bond. Swift, they note, did not attend Kloss’s 2018 wedding to Joshua Kushner.
The reason gold draws attention is that, within the so-called Taylor-Karlie theory, it functions as shorthand for the model herself. That association stems largely from “Gold Rush,” a track on Swift’s Evermore album that adherents interpret as a portrait of Kloss. They cite several lyrics in support:
- “What must it be like to grow up that beautiful? / With your hair falling into place like dominoes”
- “Everybody wants you / Everybody wonders what it would be like to love you”
- “And the coastal town / We wandered ’round had never / Seen a love as pure as it” — a passage fans tie to a trip the two took to Big Sur during the height of their friendship.
Adherents find additional gold-tinged imagery in “Champagne Problems,” another song rumored to reference Kloss:
- The song’s central figure is credited with a “Midas touch.” Kloss, for her part, once appeared in a Vogue shoot subtitled “Midas Touch” — a post Swift liked on Instagram. The complete lyric, “Midas touch on the Chevy door,” is said to echo the Chevrolet the pair were photographed alongside during their Big Sur shoot for the magazine.
- The line “One for the money, two for the show” is read as a nod to the title of that same Vogue shoot.
- “November flush and your flannel cure” is matched to November 2014, when the two were photographed together and Kloss wore flannel.
- “How evergreen, our group of friends / Don’t think we’ll say that word again” is interpreted as a reference to the wide circle of friends the pair shared — a group that, by the theory’s logic, a romance and breakup would have fractured.
- Thematically, the song turns on wealth, unrequited love and the pressures of public relationships — a framing fans argue would apply to a couple deciding whether to come out.
- At one Eras tour performance, Swift altered the line “Your mom’s ring in your pocket / Her picture in your wallet,” substituting “locket” for “pocket.” A year after the Big Sur trip, she posted a photo of a heart-shaped gold locket engraved with the date “3.6 2015” and captioned “One year down.” Kloss posted a padlock the same day, captioned “love locked down.”
Whether the gold dress amounts to a deliberate message, or the entire theory to a chain of coincidences, is a question the original participants have left unanswered — and one their fans continue to argue over.
For more from Thought Catalog, follow along on Facebook or visit our website anytime.
