Taylor Swift seemed to be everywhere in 2012 and again in 2013, popping up on every other magazine cover. Here's Swift for Vogue! For Glamour! For Cosmo! Oh wait, now she's on Vanity Fair, too?
Swift had almost as many magazine covers in the past year as she had boyfriends. But Women's Wear Daily reports that the wall-to-wall T-Swift coverage didn't actually bring in major traffic. In fact, most of Swift's covers bombed on the newsstands compared to the rest of the 2012 cover girls.
According to WWD's annual report, which culls numbers from the Alliance for Audited Media, sales of Swift's Vogue cover sold well but fell short of both Lady Gaga and Adele's 2012 Vogue covers. Sales of Swift's Glamour cover fell below that of Lauren Conrad and Victoria Beckham's, as did sales of her Harper's Bazaar cover (which we could've seen coming a mile away -- Bazaar readers aren't exactly Swift's teen demo). Lastly, Swift's Cosmo cover, which billed the singer as "crazy for a Kennedy!", bombed with slightly over one million copies sold.
These stats do not take into account the international magazines -- InStyle UK, Marie Claire UK -- nor sales of her more recent covers for Vanity Fair or Elle.
So does Swift's newsstand success mirror her love life -- flashy new developments at every turn that flop just as quickly as they began? Glamour's editor-in-chief Cindi Leive actually draws a connection between Swift's cover failures and her revolving door of boyfriends. "There may have been a little hiccup for her right around the 1-D relationship," she mused to WWD, obviously referring to Swift's dalliance with Harry Styles.
Maybe all of the headlines that Swift makes while off-duty are distracting from the intended magazine headlines. Or perhaps all the boyfriends and feuds have overexposed her to the point that we don't need Cosmo or Glamour to tell us about her personal life (a notion other media outlets have acknowledged).
Or perhaps, while we love listening to Taylor's tunes and clicking on her Grammy GIFs, we just don't idolize her as a fashion icon.
Read more at WWD.com and tell us what you think. Are you more or less likely to buy a fashion mag with Swift on the cover?
Taylor's been on a lot of covers... and with a lot of guys:
