Sarah Chapelle Talks About Taylor Swift’s Style in New Book (Exclusive)

Taylor Swift (and her fashion) never go out of style, and no one knows that better than Sarah Chapelle. 

The fashion writer behind the notable blog Taylor Swift Style has been chronicling the singer’s looks since October 2011 and might know the singer’s closet better than Swift herself. 

From Swift’s Easter-egg-riddled red carpet outfits to her street style in the Big Apple, Chapelle has an encyclopedic knowledge of the singer’s fashion, often finding her looks in under 10 minutes. 

Now, on the 13th anniversary of her first blog post, Chapelle is coming full circle with a whole book dedicated to the singer’s iconic outfits, Taylor Swift Style: Fashion Through the Eras, releasing on Oct. 8. 

While Chapelle is an OG Swiftie, noting her “instantaneous” connection with the singer’s music upon her first listen to “Our Song,” she tells PEOPLE her connection to Swift’s style first began during her Speak Now era. As Swift donned a striped Tracy Reese dress to her Wonderstruck fragrance launch on Oct. 13, 2011 (pictured below), Chapelle was inspired to write her first blog post. 

“At the time I was studying for my bachelor in journalism degree,” Chapelle tells PEOPLE. “I was obviously a fan of Taylor’s music already for quite a period, and I was studying to get better at research and storytelling. I was also trying to figure out how do I want to present myself and how do I want to navigate the identity crisis of being a young woman and trying to figure out who I am? And that often comes up with clothes.” With all three of those interests in mind, Taylor Swift Style was born. 

In many ways, Chapelle was a pioneer in the celebrity style blogging space. “At the time, the social media landscape just wasn’t what it is today,” she recalls. “I don’t even know if Instagram was a thing in 2011, but documenting celebrity fashion to the micro degree that we do now in terms of how closely we pay attention to these things just wasn’t really du jour. I wanted to create a space for fans who felt the same way I did, a niche within a niche, and occupy it for providing all of these interesting details about the fashion that she was wearing.”

As the years went by, the blog turned into something much bigger. While she’s amassed over 400K followers across Instagram and X, she’s also caught the attention of Swift herself, previously attending her 1989 Secret Sessions. 

“She is everything and more that you would expect her to be,” Chapelle says of her interaction with the singer in her N.Y.C. apartment in October 2014, noting that her home perfectly embodied the singer herself: “warm” and “beautifully scented.” 

Just as some of Swift’s biggest career moments have happened in 13s, Chapelle is fortuitously releasing her first book about the singer on the 13th anniversary of her style blog, an effort she says has been three years in the making. 

“It’s really just an extension of the 13 years of work that I’ve been doing on the blog, and it feels like a piece of my heart,” she says. “In terms of timing, I didn’t choose this time of year, but she’s just had a truly meteoric last few years,” she adds referencing the singer’s successful Eras Tour amid her rerecordings. 

“Both music and fashion act as a time capsule to anchor ourselves to a point in time, and that’s the thing I love about this book is that it’s this fashionable and musical evolution through the eras,” she says. “It was wild writing this book, specifically, as Taylor was also doing the re-records project because as she was going through her past discography and reclaiming and revisiting parts of her narrative, I was going back through my blog’s archives and remembering the girl who first wrote that caption or the person I was and the relationships that I was in or the feelings that I was experiencing when I was first documenting these things.” 

“It’s been a really kismet, faded, parallel train track journey,” she adds, noting another full-circle Swiftie moment will happen for her later as she attends one of Swift’s final Eras Tour concerts in her hometown. “As we know of, currently the tour is ending this year in Vancouver, in my backyard. [The] layers of compounding fate and timing is just magic.” 

While Chapelle originally created Taylor Swift Style as a way to express herself as a writer, what it ended up giving her was a community. 

“The thing that I wanted when I first created the blog was that I wanted to find people,” she notes. “What’s interesting about the evolution of the blog and is obviously a big part of why I’m here now, is that when I first created it, I actually didn’t write commentary at all. I thought that people don’t want to hear from me. People don’t care about my opinion. People just want information. The transformative thing about the blog is almost taking a page out of Taylor’s book in that when you open up and become personal and become vulnerable, people will come, and you’ll find community, and you’ll find people who share your opinions or who share your thoughts. And that only happens when you’re brave enough to let people in and see that.”  

“I only started writing captions and commentary because people seemed to want it, and my audience seemed to ask for it,” she continues. “That is the entire reason why the book exists because the book is my commentary and my nuanced intentional thoughts and takes on her fashion.” 

Just as Swift has captivated fans with her re-recordings in recent years, Chapelle hopes to have a similar effect on her followers with her new book. “What the re-records do so successfully is that they provide older fans like us this opportunity to remember what that first experience was like when we first heard these songs,” she says about Swift’s recent albums. “I hope that this book provides an opportunity for new fans to catch up on this visual legacy that she’s had while also giving older fans this beautiful and lovingly packaged book that walks through some of the fondest memories of the last two decades of her career. It’s just this beautiful love letter to her fashions.”