How should a poet dress? Since announcing her forthcoming album, The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift—who’s been known to underline her albums’ themes and aesthetics with her own fashion choices—has shown us what, to her, a “tortured poet” looks like. The aesthetic can take several forms: She announced the album at the Grammys in February while wearing a custom strapless Schiaparelli couture gown with a thigh-high slit, lengthy train, and sculptural bodice, pairing the dramatic monochrome gown with inky black opera gloves. On the forthcoming album’s cover, the musician is wearing much less in a black-and-white photo of her lying on a crumpled pillow in her bedclothes. The looks are part of Swift’s world-building ahead of the album’s release, priming us to expect introspective, moody tracks. Swift is no stranger to using canonical, capital-l literature as a reference point for her songwriting, even indirectly name-checking the Romantic poet William Wordsworth in her song “The Lakes,” and her style choices are no less an Easter egg than her song lyrics when it comes to understanding her music.

When we think of a poet’s style, the language, voice, rhymes, and imagery in their work come to mind faster than the writer’s sartorial choices. But clothing, too, can speak its own silent language—signaling unspeakable desires, dreams of becoming someone else, fantasies of breaking convention or conforming to it. Oftentimes, clothes communicate before we do. And like poetry, clothes can speak in riddles and rhymes, through lines—the long, flowing drape of a trench coat or the short, cropped hem of a T-shirt—and colors and textures, perhaps nodding at other eras or hidden meanings, layering references as one might layer a sweater under a coat. Swift, of course, is no newcomer to a subtextual wink via clothing, able to set off a frenzy of speculation simply by donning a pair of snakeskin-print boots.

Consider the American poet Emily Dickinson, whose image is etched in history, with her wearing an omnipresent white house dress and sporting hair parted austerely down the middle. In her lifetime, she was said to go about “wholly in white,” and the only dress of hers that remains conforms to this narrative—a white wrapper with mother-of-pearl buttons, lace trim, and a simple, boxy shape for freedom of movement. Her snowy dresses might have meant any number of things: religious rigor, renunciation of the world, an embrace of a kind of severe beauty (as she writes: “A solemn thing—it was—I said/A woman—white—to be/And wear—”).

Swift, too, used white dresses while initially constructing her public image, relying on the simple garments as a way to fit within a tradition she wasn’t initially associated with. In the very first frame of her debut music video, for the song “Tim McGraw,” Swift lies by a lake in a white slip dress as she recounts her teenage heartbreak. Again, she paces in a frothy white sundress in her video for “Fifteen,” an elegy to the innocence of youth. She wears a white prom dress in the “You Belong With Me” video, yearning for the boy next door, and a white spaghetti strap dress while singing about learning to be vulnerable with a loved one in “Mine.” Presenting herself for the consideration of Nashville music execs and country music audiences alike, the Pennsylvania-born Swift supplied a ready-made persona with her white gowns: pure, sweet, and young, with nothing sullying these skirts.

Think Sylvia Plath’s preppy, collegiate style in photographs of her at Smith College in the ’50s. In her journals from that time, she describes herself as lonely, awkward, homely, and “without identity: faceless.” But her clothes and lipstick and jaunty bob projected—nay, perfected—an image of all-American girlness that betrayed none of her true feelings. Similarly, Swift has long understood the trappings and seductions of playing the perfect all-American girl, writing about the ways in which clothing can both cover us up and cover for us. In “Blank Space,” she satirizes the public image of her as a serial dater with biting self-awareness, telling a new lover that she is a “nightmare dressed like a daydream.” And in “Style,” she writes about having “that red lip classic thing that you like” and “that good girl faith and a tight little skirt,” even while knowing it’s inevitable that she and her love interest will “go crashing down.”

Think of the beatniks and their easily recognizable, sometimes satirized style, made famous and fashionable by Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face. In the film, Hepburn plays the bookish Jo Stockton in black turtlenecks, black capris, and white socks paired with loafers, a look that was meant to renounce fashion and frippery but became its own aesthetic reference point for its elegance and sense of understated cool. Like Jo Stockton, the beatniks thought of their close-fitting, simple clothes as practical uniforms for the intellectual life, a stark contrast to the hyperfeminine full skirts and cinched waists of the time’s fashionable “New Look” style. Once more, the clothes worked to serve and underline the themes of the work. Interestingly, Swift, who is known for her glamorous and girly red-carpet looks, donned a version of Hepburn’s beatnik-inspired outfit when performing at the Grammy Museum in 2015. In a simple black turtleneck and black skinny jeans, offset by a bright red lip, she played stripped-down versions of singles from her first official pop album, 1989. The connotation was clear—Swift wasn’t just a princess-like pop star; she was a serious songwriter cementing her legacy in musical history.

For Swift, the Schiaparelli gown that introduced her Tortured Poets era evoked a jumbled pastness that somehow seemed to gesture, all at once, toward black-and-white images of Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf, Rainer Maria Rilke and Christina Rossetti. Listeners should expect high-minded drama, the look said. Swift’s custom Schiaparelli dress (a diversion for a brand known for its black dresses with surrealist touches of gold) also hinted at what was to come, the pleating evoking tousled bedsheets that invite the viewer to imagine her undone and alone in bed. The cover of The Tortured Poets Department features Swift lying on her bed in a sheer Saint Laurent silk singlet and briefs from The Row, with a sliver of morning light falling on her body, making it seem as if the viewer is peeking through a crack in her drawn curtains. Here, she is offering the viewer a glimpse at her vulnerability, making it clear that, for Swift, poetry is confessional.

Creating a contrast to these moody, monochromatic looks, Swift has lately opted for preppy pleated and plaid skirts with heeled loafers to create her “off-duty” (if the special kind of billionaire, according to Forbes, could ever really be off duty) style. However, the Venn diagram of Swift’s work life and personal life is essentially a perfect circle, so consider this her “nonpromotional” category of dressing, though it still works in service of the upcoming album. It’s a uniform worn when joining friends at restaurants and cheering on boyfriend Travis Kelce and the Kansas City Chiefs during football games. On Christmas Day, at a Raiders-vs.-Chiefs game, she wore a bright red Ralph Lauren cable-knit sweater, a black bow, and a plaid pleated skirt, all topped off with a festive Santa Claus hat. Swift’s school-girl-inspired street style may feel jarring when contrasted with her melancholic promotional looks, but consider that she has signed messages around the album as “the chairman” of the titular department. Her looks scream all-American girl—which Swift is always some flavor of, whether giving off the bleached-out punk vibe of Reputation, showcasing the girls-just-wanna-have-fun glee of 1989, or embracing the ’70s color palette and knit polo shirts of Midnights—while leaning heavily into pieces associated with academia and mid-century school culture. She might as well be an English grad student carrying books of poetry in the crook of her elbow. Swift may not be at work, but she’s making her style work for her, adding another annotation in listeners’ minds to support her latest reinvention into an ink-stained wretch.

We might think of Swift’s expansive interpretation of poet style as encapsulating both the perfect plaid skirts of the student and the dramatic, corseted gowns—white as a fresh sheet of paper—of the master poet. Taken together, these two modes of dress might be a sign that she’s not quite living a double life; she’s just dressing as if she’s inspired, as all the best poets are, by the possibilities of doubleness and double meanings.

A rep for Swift did not return Vanity Fair’s request for comment.