Taylor Swift has shared the music video for “Lavender Haze,” a cut from her latest album Midnights.
Taking its title from a Mad Men episode, “Lavender Haze” sees Swift singing about antiquated gender roles. It was also partially inspired by Swift having to dodge “weird rumors” and “tabloid stuff” over the course of her career.
Laith Ashley De La Cruz, a transgender actor and activist, plays Swift’s love interest in the video. “There is lots of lavender. There is lots of haze. There is my incredible costar @laith_ashley who I absolutely adored working with,” Swift wrote in a tweet upon the video’s release. “This was the first video I wrote out of the 3 that have been released, and this one really helped me conceptualize the world and mood of Midnights, like a sultry sleepless 70’s fever dream. Hope you like it.”
Swift has been a longtime advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. During a 2020 speech commemorating the 51st anniversary of the Stonewall riots, Swift called out the erasure of transgender and nonbinary people from the US census. “When you don’t collect information on a group of people, that means you have every excuse in the world not to support them. When you don’t collect data on a community, that’s a really, really brutal way of dismissing them,” she said at the time.
“Lavender Haze” marks the third music video released in support of Midnights, following “Anti-Hero” and “Bejeweled.”
Earlier this week, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing over Ticketmaster’s botched handling of Swift’s “The Eras Tour.” Though Swift didn’t testify, she previously said the debacle “really pisses me off.” Some fans are suing Ticketmaster, while Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti has announced that he’s investigating the company for potential antitrust violations.
Tickets for “The Eras Tour” are available via Stubhub — where your order is 100% guaranteed through Stubhub’s FanProtect program.
The Lavender Haze video is out now. There is lots of lavender. There is lots of haze. There is my incredible costar @laith_ashley who I absolutely adored working with.https://t.co/auFTSVBP0A pic.twitter.com/RXWPuKvkxK
— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) January 27, 2023