Taylor Swift took some time in a recent interview to explain why she opts not to show her belly button even if she’s in a swim suit.
Swift, 24, is known for keeping her belly button hidden even when baring other skin around her stomach, leading to a range of speculation, although pictures from years ago have captured her with the belly button showing.
“I don’t like showing my belly button. When you start showing your belly button then you’re really committing to the midriff thing. I only partially commit to the midriff thing—you’re only seeing lower rib cage. I don’t want people to know if I have one or not.” Swift told Lucky magazine, laughing.
“I want that to be a mystery. As far as anyone knows based on my public appearances, they haven’t seen evidence of a belly button. It could be pierced. They have no idea.
“If I’m going to get some sort of massive tattoo, it’s going to be right next to my belly button because no one’s ever going to see that.”
Swift keeping some skin hidden is part of her persona. Although she isn’t explicitly modest she doesn’t “sell concupiscence as Beyonce or Rihanna do [and] she doesn’t sell sexual outlandishness like Miley Cyrus, or anamorphic oddity a la Lady Gaga,” noted Bloomberg View.
“Taylor Swift has up to this point been a sort of subtle and sophisticated sex symbol, more like a young Lauren Bacall or Audrey Hepburn, than a typical pop hoochie mama like Ke$ha,” Howard Miller, a social historian and associate professor at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee, explained.
“Taylor Swift was selling friendship to the pre-teens and early-teens who were her biggest fans, but she was also selling a sort of low-key, nice girl sexuality to them. Her image is aspirational for girls on the cusp of (or just past) puberty, it’s sexy, but not threatening and not gross, more like the A student, homecoming queen in a tight dress,” said Miller.
