Tay-Tay’s Ophelia is positively drowning in highbrow artistic references

Is Heyser’s depiction of Shakespeare’s doomed heroine the source of Swift’s inspiration? Some wonder if it’s John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (hanging in Tate Britain). To me, Swift’s floaty white dress is more John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott, albeit via Net-a-Porter. Though, in the video, Swift’s Ophelia gloriously survives to burn through multiple visual tributes: Moulin Rouge, the Supremes, Esther Williams’s water ballets… and on and on.

Pop has always had its magpies and shapeshifters, but with Ophelia Swift seems faster, more of a hyperlink: a very modern click-through encompassing Shakespeare, fine art and pop domination. It’s a little late for requests – such videos are planned like military operations – but, for the next Swiftian art-pop collision, I’d like to see Tay-Tay tackle Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (she could sing about her engagement ring being flashier) or Edvard Munch’s The Scream (“He hasn’t texted back!”). How about Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa – what mean man conjured that longsuffering smile?

One could be generous and liken chatfishing to Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac: a chatbot Cupid giving the shy and tongue-tied a helping hand. Besides, people have busy lives – they can’t be downloading “sweet nothings” from their actual organic brains all day long. Outsourcing wooing is the modern way to go.

On the other hand, there’s an unlovely whiff of the incel about this. It’s also reminiscent of those stories you hear about businessmen getting secretaries to pick out gifts for wives and girlfriends.

Somehow chatfishing seems even colder, even more low-effort, for new love, when people are supposed to be building something: relationship-scaffolding, or whatever. Say what you like about previous generations but we inappropriately flirted unaided. We owned our poor judgment and spelling mistakes. However busy you are, how much of modern romance can reasonably be delegated?

So many thoughts. Some accuse Kardashian of trivialising a serious female body-image issue. Others see the merkins heralding an oft-mooted “return to female body hair” (they mean pubic hair). Hear that, ladies: womankind has waited so long for commercialism and pornography to grant us the right to have pubic hair again and along comes La Kardashian to make it happen. Praise be, indeed.

Body-hair revivals aside, it’s interesting that the sold-out merkins are $32: a fairly reasonable price point indicating they’re a clear mass-market retail tease – surely the first to seriously rival the heady days of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop “This Smells Like My Vagina” candle?

Photograph by Michael Probst/AP