CULTURE

Taylor Swift Has Red Hair in Teaser for New “Babe” Music Video With Sugarland

Joan from Mad Men, but make it Taylor.


Taylor Swift Performs At Circuit Of The Americas
Gary Miller/Getty Images

The old, blonde Taylor Swift can’t come to the phone right now. That’s because the new Taylor Swift is red. Yes, that’s because the singer made a major hair change for her appearance in the new music video for Sugarland’s “Babe,” which she cowrote and to which she contributes some background vocals.

On Wednesday, Swift shared a teaser of the video, which drops in full on Saturday, on Instagram. The song is sung from the point of view of a woman who’s been cheated on and is breaking up with her partner; in the clip, Sugarland singer Jennifer Nettles plays that woman, actor Brandon Routh plays her partner, and Swift plays his mistress. The video appears to take place in the 1960s of Mad Men, all martinis and shift dresses and overhairsprayed bouffants, and it shows Swift (looking a lot like fiery redhead Joan Holloway from the hit TV show) apparently luring Routh away from an increasingly suspicious Nettles.

Though it’s somewhat jarring to see the pop star without her trademark buttery blonde hair and long bangs, she easily pulls off the coppery red ‘do. The only downside of the new look is that she already named an album Red and therefore, sadly, can’t produce an entire LP dedicated to her new ginger locks.

Swift has ditched her signature blonde before, always for the sake of a music video, and usually while playing some stereotypically villainous role: Back in 2009, she donned a chocolate brown wig to play the high school cheerleader/mean girl counterpart to her blonde band geek self in the “You Belong With Me” video, and again in 2015, for her safari-themed “Wildest Dreams” video. Also in 2015, for the “Bad Blood” video, in which she and her girl gang played some sort of high-tech assassin squad with dubious motives, Swift donned another fiery red wig. Weird but true: In the Taylor Swift universe, villains physically can’t have blonde hair!