Cast your mind back to July 4th 2016. A day of national celebration across the Atlantic, it was also a time when the celebrity pairing fondly referred to as ‘Hiddleswift’ was at its peak – when actor Tom Hiddleston was photographed wading through the ocean in a tank top that apparently proclaimed his love for then-girlfriend Taylor Swift, bearing the slogan ‘I Heart T. S.’
The image quickly became the perfect meme. Was it real? Was it fake? Were we all labouring under some kind of hyper-specific collective hallucination? Given that neither party in the relationship seemed willing to comment upon Tom’s seemingly outré fashion choice, it seemed that said tank top would remain as one of the greatest mysteries of 2016, if not the 21st century.
Now, thanks to a new interview with Hiddleston in GQ, we finally have some concrete answers, and in the words of the man himself, the whole thing was merely ‘a joke.’
‘The truth is, it was the Fourth of July and a public holiday and we were playing a game and I slipped and hurt my back,’ he recalls. ‘And I wanted to protect the graze from the sun and said, “Does anyone have a T-shirt?”’
He continues…
‘And one of her friends said, “I’ve got this.” The friend pulled out the I Heart T.S. tank top that Taylor’s friends are contractually obligated to own. And we all laughed about it. It was a joke.’
Seemingly unaware of the column inches that anyone in Taylor’s inner circle can expect, the actor goes on to describe his ‘surprise’ at the interest in his Fourth of July attire, adding ‘I was just surprised that it got so much attention. The tank top became an emblem of this thing.’
‘A relationship exists between two people. We will always know what it was. The narratives that are out there altogether have been extrapolated from pictures that were taken without consent or permission, with no context. Nobody had the context for that story. And I’m still trying to work out a way of having a personal life and protecting it, but also without hiding. So the hardest thing is that that was a joke among friends at Fourth of July,’ he says.
As for the nay-sayers who claimed that Taylor and Tom’s much-photographed relationship was some kind of elaborate, post-modern publicity stunt, the actor has a few important things to share.
‘Of course it was real. Taylor Swift is an amazing woman. She’s generous and kind and lovely, and we had the best time.’
To paraphrase Taylor herself, haters gonna hate, hate, hate, but Tom, it seems, is avowedly not one of those haters. What a nice, polite chap.
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