Taylor Swift Named ‘TIME’ Person of the Year

The magazine just announced the pop icon as the recipient of the prestigious honor.

Taylor Swift.Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images

The TIME Person of the Year award is a huge honor. Past recipients include former U.S. presidents, important political figures and tech giants. Last year, the honor was awarded to the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. All of which is to say, it’s a big deal, and it speaks to the importance of the recipient’s work and public persona.

This year, the honor has been awarded to Taylor Swift, a momentous and, perhaps, expected choice. Though the 33-year-old has, for several years now, been one of the most acclaimed celebrities (of our modern era certainly, but of all time as well), she is only now approaching her peak.

She expressed as much in an interview with TIME. Her career has seen both peaks and valleys, but Swift’s trajectory for some time now has only been going up. “It feels like the breakthrough moment of my career, happening at 33,” she told the outlet. “And for the first time in my life, I was mentally tough enough to take what comes with that.” 

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The award announcement comes in the midst of Swift’s record-breaking “The Eras Tour,” which is on track to be the highest-grossing tour ever. In fact, according to TIME, even the Federal Reserve recognized her as the reason for a rise in economic growth. That is to say, her fame has created more than just frenzy (and joy) among her expansive fanbase—it has been the means of stimulating the local economies that play host to her extensive tour.

While that is certainly an added bonus, for Swift, the tour is also a means of coming to terms with every phase of herself and her music.

“Every part of you that you’ve ever been, every phase you’ve ever gone through, was you working it out in that moment with the information you had available to you at the time,” she told the magazine. “There’s a lot that I look back at like, ‘Wow, a couple years ago I might have cringed at this.’ You should celebrate who you are now, where you’re going, and where you’ve been.”

If it wasn’t already clear (and we think it was crystal), TIME just confirmed that Swift is a mover and a shaker in our modern times.

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