Zoë, Hailey, and the Squad of No Allegiances

Zoë Kravitz and Hailey Bieber were photographed in LA leaving the gym together and I’m using this opportunity to talk about Taylor Swift’s Squad of 2023, and how similar and not similar the squad life is in comparison to1989the OG version.

她这些天不给浪漫喜剧尖叫时,Taylor’s been seen a lot with her friends. There have been group dinners in New York and LA with a rotating roster of regulars: Zoë, Selena Gomez, Sophie Turner, Gigi Hadid, Cara Delevingne, the Haim sisters etc. It’s not Rhode Island but it’s the same energy but also a different energy because this time around, it seems less… petty, right?

I say this because Hailey, as we know, has never, ever been part of the squad. Earlier this year, in fact, there was a mess on social media because of anold clip that resurfacedof Hailey and Justin seemingly mocking Taylor and then Selena entered the chat and we don’t need to revisit that history because that is not what this post is about.

My point is that Zoë, a current member of the Squad, and Gigi, a longtime member of the Squad, are both friendly with Hailey. Which does not seem to affect their relationship with Taylor – and I don’t know if that would have been the case nine years ago but these are indications that1989 (Taylor’s Version)isn’t so concerned with allegiances anymore. Maybe they were never all that concerned with allegiances back in the day and the media and the internet made it more of a big deal that it actually was but it’s so much more obvious now that, well, nobody is stressing over that sh-t anymore. And besides, really, what’s there to stress over anyway when we’re in the midst of a full-blown rom-com for the ages!

Staying on the subject of friendships though, as Maria noted yesterday inCelebrity Social Media, Gigi actually made the rare move of shutting down the rumours that have been circulating about Taylor’s friends supposedly not being entirely supportive of her relationship with Travis Kelce. As I’ve maintained over the last couple of weeks, that speculation seemed super sus to me because whyyyyyyy would any of Taylor’s friends want that smoke?

The mystery here isn’t about whether or not her friends are leaking their (false) worries to the media but who is actually doing the false leaking…and why. Page Six is one of the outlets that reported on the story. And while Page Six can be dirty AF at times, they also have some solid sources. They’re not as consistently unreliable as the Daily Mail and they do get a lot right. So if they weren’t making the whole thing up…

My working theory is that this isn’t about smoke, but it could be a smoke-out. As in smoking out a rat. We don’t talk about this enough, but we should. How celebrities sometimes, in order to temperature-check the trustworthiness of their circle, dribble out lies, intentionally, to select members of the friend groups and then wait and see whether or not those same lies end up making their way public. If it does, they know who they can trace it back to.

Nobody on the A list will openly admit to engaging in this kind of subterfuge but we got a low level example of it a couple of years ago during the Wagatha Christie trial (this name still kills me!) when Colleen Rooney revealed that she trapped Rebekah Vardy by posting fake private Instagram stories that ended up getting reported inThe Sun.

Is it possible that we were getting all these bullsh-t stories in the press about Taylor’s friends being worried about her moving too quickly with Travis because Taylor was trying to catch a rat?! We can talk about this more atThe Squawktoday, in the Daily Chat.