Taylor Swift is known for her singing and songwriting, not for posting revealing photos online. She is so modest that she doesn’t post photos showing her belly button – so fans were surprised when she posted a photo of herself with friends in a bikini.
It turns out Swift wasn’t trying to pull a Kardashian – she was preventing the paparazzi from having exclusive vacation photos of her in a bikini.
Here’s what happened:
While whale watching with band members from HAIM, they noticed a boat trailing them, full of paparazzi.
Photo: Instagram
“My security gets out the binoculars and sees that they have a huge long lens camera,” the savvy businesswoman told BBC Radio. “At which point, we go back to the beach and realize, ‘OK, so they got pictures of us in our bikinis.’”
“I don’t want them to make, like, $100,000 – for a bikini shot. And so we’re like, ‘Get up on the bow of the boat: we’re taking better bikini shots so that they don’t make as much money on theirs.’”
Swift found out later the paparazzi had been following them the whole time. "I've never seen such stealth mode paparazzi, like, long-lensing it up, three miles away," she said.
The bikini photo that Swift posted to Instagram was a real departure for the songstress, who’d previously told Lucky Magazine she planned on keeping her belly button covered.
"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," Swift said. "I don't want people to know if I have one or not ... I want that to be a mystery."
Stealing the paparazzi’s thunder is a pretty good reason to post bikini photos, if you ask us.