Taylor Swift has been accused of lifting elements from director Spike Jonze's 2016 Kenzo perfume commercial for her new music video.
The Bad Blood hitmaker's promo for Delicate debuted at the iHeartRadio Music Awards on Sunday night (11Mar18), with the footage featuring a bored Swift, apparently sick of her superstardom, practising her fake smile for the public and the press in a mirror.
She discovers she has become invisible, and celebrates by kicking off her heels as she dances around in a wild and goofy manner in a lobby and through the corridors of a luxury hotel.
While many fans praised the singer online for the new clip, others couldn't help but notice striking similarities between the video and the two-year-old Kenzo World advertisement, which featured actress Margaret Qualley acting out in a similar manner after escaping a fancy gala. The perfume promo, directed by filmmaker Jonze, was set to the sounds of Mutant Brain by Sam Spiegel & Ape Drums, featuring Assassin.
"Taylor Swift's 'Delicate' video is a poor man's version of Spike Jonze's ad for Kenzo, this bop (tune) deserved more," grumbled one music fan, while another wrote: "Anybody else notice that the @taylorswift13 'Delicate' music video ripped off Spike Jonze's Kenzo video? It's almost beat-for-beat, just with worse dancing".
Meanwhile, New York Magazine's senior producer Kenny Wassus remarked, "taylor's 'delicate' video is the drunk sorority knockoff of the kenzo ad w (with) margaret quailey (sic)," before going one step further and highlighting certain scenes from both videos to illustrate his point, checking off similarities like, "silly wink faces", "angry gorilla dance", and "ballet leap".
Delicate was directed by Taylor's frequent collaborator Joseph Kahn, who previously faced criticism for appearing to borrow imagery from Beyonce's 2016 Formation video for Swift's Look What You Made Me Do promo last summer (17).
