She didn’t know about Taylor and Travis’ big announcement at the time. In her Aug. 22 edition of The Adventurine, Marion Fasel was focused on a different “Easter egg” she’d spotted in her travels through the social media Swiftieverse.
Four days later, the entire jewelry industry would be buzzing about the engagement ring Taylor Swift received from Travis Kelce.
Prior to that explosive moment, however, the “Tayvis” topic du jour was the couple’s Aug. 13 appearance on the New Heights podcast hosted by Jason Kelce, Swift’s future brother-law. To the delight of her loyal fans, Swift announced during the show that she’d be releasing a new album, titled The Life of a Showgirl, on Oct. 3.
“One thing that has kept the Swiftie community working overtime is discovering and deciphering the meaning of all the Easter eggs from the New Heights podcast. It’s a totally entertaining distraction to watch the smartest Swifties solve complex puzzles on Instagram Reels,” Fasel wrote on The Adventurine, which recently pivoted to the Substack platform.
While watching this content creator, Fasel explained to her readers, she’d zoomed in on an Easter egg of her own discovery: Tucked into the bookshelf behind Swift and her groom-to-be was a jewelry book waiting for a true jewelry detective to notice.
That book was Vogue: The Jewellery by Carol Woolton, published in 2020. Woolton is British Vogue’s longtime jewelry editor and the host of the If Jewels Could Talk podcast (her book of the same title was published last year).
The pistachio green book cover is instantly recognizable to those in the know (I myself received the Vogue book as a gift for my birthday last month). But its presence is really subtle when you scan the podcast taping on YouTube.
So when Fasel revealed her discovery, my jaw dropped. Like Fasel, this writer is a “late in life” Swiftie—and I promptly went on to devour her analysis like candy.
“I may be an amateur Swiftie, but I am a veteran jewelry journalist, which means I need to do, as the fanbase describes it, some ‘clowning’ and try to figure it out,” Fasel wrote.
And here’s a recap of her findings (shared with her permission, of course):
“The cover of Vogue: The Jewellery is about the same green used on the Showgirl main album cover. However, I think there is more to it, because there always is with Taylor.”
“In the book title, Jewellery is spelled in the British manner with an extra ‘l’ and ‘e’ in the same way her song ‘Cancelled’ is on Showgirl. The ‘Cancelled’ in British English is loaded with meaning from Taylor’s long history in London. The Jewellery spelling could also be significant.”
“The book might be related to the ‘Elizabeth Taylor’ song on the album. The Oscar winner, who was as famous for her jewelry as movies and AIDS activism, appears not once, not twice but three times in Vogue: The Jewellery.”
Trust me, there’s even more Taylor x Taylor connections to dig into along these lines in the subscriber version of The Adventurine on Substack.
Speaking of, even the biggest fans of Fasel’s work might not yet have gotten the memo that The Adventurine now lives on Substack. Why the switchover?
“There are a number of reasons, but one of the main ones relates to how Google functions now,” Fasel tells JCK. “In the past, search was my main source of traffic. People would look for something jewelry-related and find me. Now, Google is scraping websites and providing answers with a form of AI that you see at the top of a search. This has caused website traffic to plummet across the internet. Substack offers some protection from this.”
The platform, accessible via app or desktop, also makes it easier for readers to find and access Fasel’s content, ensuring they are always in the loop about the culture of jewelry as we live and breathe it today, the history of jewelry, and how the two are interconnected. I personally love having her writing served up to me in my inbox, ensuring I don’t miss anything major (like this Taylor Swift jewelry book business, which has been a total delight).
Ring, ring…was the existence of this version of Carol Woolton’s Vogue: The Jewellery book an Easter egg about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s impending engagement?
“I started by guaranteeing one email every Sunday and more when news breaks,” says Fasel. “I have written a lot more than I thought I would. Substack, and the immediate feedback it has brought, have reenergized me.”
The blog WhoWoreWhatJewels recently tipped its hat to Fasel’s jewelry book discovery on Instagram. Could the book’s presence have been signaling the Taylor-Travis engagement all along? That team’s take: somewhere between maybe and probably. As the post highlights, they uncovered a case that held the book in one of its original print runs—a case featuring an illustration of a hand wearing what appears to be an engagement ring. (I found a copy of this case-covered version of the book on 1st Dibs.)
Surely there is more to come on all these fronts. And lucky for us, Fasel’s readers should be among the first to know. Consider subscribing to her Substack to stay in the loop.
Top: The Carol Woolton book that jewelry author and historian Marion Fasel noticed winking at her from the bookshelf behind Taylor Swift during an Aug. 13 podcast—Fasel declared the book an Easter egg in an Adventurine column on Aug. 22, and you know what happened on Aug 26.