Unless you invited your 15 best girl friends to your Rhode Island manse where you baked pies and lounged on fancy boats and waded your feet in the ocean, your Fourth of July (probably) bore very little resemblance to Taylor Swift’s—well, save for the pie part maybe, and perhaps some of you waded your feet in the ocean (though it’s doubtful your feet-wading was as carefully curated for Instagram as Swift’s).
Yes, Swift hosted a Fourth of July extravaganza for her friends this weekend that looked like an Abercrombie & Fitch fever dream. Swift’s well-documented cadre of famous BFFs is an impressive bunch: models, actresses, singers—and almost all of them use Instagram, which makes it possible to piece together the components of their revelry after the fact like you’re a detective (erm, O.K., . . . like an actor playing a teenage detective on a CW show, more accurately).
Swift helpfully posted a shot of the entire gang that spent the weekend at her Rhode Island estate (captioned “family portrait”), and it includes representatives from a number of the different tables that make up the high-school cafeteria that is her social circle. Why, there’s Lena Dunham, giving a one-fingered salute that no doubt had scores of tweens asking their parents, “Hey, why is that girl who’s on that show I’m not allowed to watch—even though it’s called Girls, and, um, I am a GIRL, aren’t I?. . . also, everyone at school watches it, even Nerd Becky—holding up one finger in the air? What does that mean?” And look, on the opposite side of the frame, there’s Emma Stone, looking slightly uncomfortable! (You just know she got in the car after the weekend, turned to boyfriend Andrew Garfield, who was also there, and just laughed for three straight minutes before exclaiming, “Where do we even begin?”) Cuddled up next to Taylor is Jaime King, who appeared to enjoy rarified Swift attention this weekend, on the receiving end of a solo portrait taken by Swift, which, according to her Instagram caption, she “showed to everyone constantly for the whole trip.” (Endearing, no? We’ve all been in the “I just took such a good picture of my pretty friend and I am going to show it to all of you whether you like it or not!” boat). And look, it’s Jessica Szohr (better known as Irritating Hipster Vanessa from Gossip Girl), who better parlay this spot in the “family portrait” into at least a recurring role on a USA drama. And if you really want to come off as a celebrity savant to your friends, when they G-chat you “did u see the tswift 4th of july insta??,” you can respond, “Yeah, to me, Jessica Stam really stands out the most” or “she should have captioned it ‘Ingrid Michaelson and friends,’ am I right?,” and your friends will never doubt you when you I.D. a familiar-looking actress in a movie that happens to be playing on HBO again!
