Thursday, August 9, was a historical day for Taylor Swift fans. Not because Swift announced the re-recording of her blockbuster pop album 1989, but because the Swifties were actually right for once. They collected the signs—a blue dress worn here, a suspicious Starbucks playlist there—but above all, it’s the numbers. 1989 (Taylor’s Version) was announced on 8/9. Get it?
The numbers actually go even deeper than that. Taylor Nation, the official social media account for Swift’s team, posted shortly before the announcement about “53 shows, 20 cities, 10 Eras, 5 months, and 1 thing’s for sure…” add up the numbers and what do you get? 89. And prior to that, Swifties sussed out an even more deranged numeric clue: it had been 3,208 days since 1989 had been released, and 3 + 2 + 0 +8 =13, and 13 is Taylor Swift’s lucky number. The rabbit hole goes so deep one starts to feel like the Pepe Silva meme.
Numerology has become a pillar of Swiftiedom, for better or usually worse. Amongst themselves, Swifties call their elaborate and typically inaccurate theories “clowning,” or more recently “being delulu.” (That’s internet slang for “delusional.”) A large swath of devoted fans has become caught up in a cycle of sussing out supposed Easter eggs, being loudly wrong, shrugging it off, and diving back in to find new clues.
The past few years have seen many notable examples of “clownery” that made its way to the wider Swiftie fandom. There’s the “five holes in the fence” theory, which dates back to 2019 when what looked like a countdown on Swift’s Instagram (seven palm trees in one post, six stairs in another, and then five holes in the fence) amounted to nothing. Then there was the “Woodvale” theory, that there would be a third album to complement folklore and evermore because of an apparent printing error and the three-tier color scheme on Swift’s merch in 2020. The obsessive quest for clues which often pan out to nothing sometimes makes the fandom look like QAnon lite.
It’s not strictly the Swifties’ fault that they’ve become so entrenched in the Easter egg lifestyle. “I’ve trained them to be that way,” Swift stated to Entertainment Weekly back in 2019. In a video for the outlet, she described placing a special seal on April 13th of her official Reputation merch calendar because she knew years in advance that she wanted to start a countdown to something on that date. In 2020, she told Jimmy Kimmel (via Billboard), “The numerology thing, when it doesn’t take over on its own, I sort of force it to happen.”
So was the 3,208 days between 1989 and the Taylor’s Version announcement an example of the numerology “taking over on its own,” or did Swift actually figure out the days and plan accordingly? At this point, both are equally likely. For every theory that proves correct, even if it’s few and far between, it validates the fandom’s obsession with trying to crack Swift’s code—and that, apparently, is just how she likes it. “I love that they like the cryptic hint-dropping,” she told EW of her fans. “Because as long as they like it, I’ll keep doing it. It’s fun. It feels mischievous and playful.” In other words: Keep clowning, kids.