Taylor Swift is currently one of the most famous artists on planet Earth: on Instagram alone she has 274 million followers and on Spotify she is the second most listened to in the world, only behind The Weeknd. She has released ten albums, five world tours and thousands of magazine covers, in addition to 40 awards at the American Music Awards.
But if all this is surprising, perhaps it is even more striking to know that he achieved all this before he was forty. That’s right: Taylor is only 32 and in 2019 she was chosen by Billboard magazine as the “Woman of the Decade.” All this data helps to understand the true “swiftiemania” that has been unleashed for months in Buenos Aires, the city where Taylor will give three recitals in November.
In Argentina, in fact, the artist’s fans make up a veritable army that knows her lyrics, sings each song in perfect English and who – just to mention one fact – when the tickets for these recitals went on sale – even asked for on social networks that only tickets were sold to local fans. Any other information? After three days of pure jumping and shouting at the River stadium, it is estimated that the grass will be damaged and precisely for this reason none other than the National Team will travel to Córdoba to play nothing less than the World Cup qualifiers.
So who is this girl who has made even world champions agree to play elsewhere? In addition to everything that has already been said, she is an internationally famous singer who even has a “swiftipedia” in Spanish and whose last book was illustrated, of course, by an Argentinean.
The Taylor Vault
The book is called Taylor from the Vault (something like Taylor from the Vault) but there is nothing macabre about the title. In reality, the expression “from the vault” refers to all that musical material (versions of songs or directly songs that never saw the light of day) and that she recovers in this volume. But in addition to music and lyrics, in this book there are many of her phrases, illustrations of iconic moments in her career and, basically, all those details and anecdotes that fascinate her fans.
This will be the first time that the artist performs in Latin America and the fandom is going crazy. That is why the Penguin publishing house decided to publish this book that many already define as a “souvenir book”, a publication full of memories and winks to the public that has adored it for years.
The Argentine illustrator of Taylor from the Vault is from Mar del Plata, her name is Azul Portillo and she graduated from the National University of La Plata. How did she come to draw Taylor and fully reproduce her wardrobe from all her eras? Azul tells it in detail on her own Instagram (@azulportillo) and says that her order arrived in June of this year. “They asked me for six illustrations for the interior and one for the cover. I had two months to complete the project. For the cover they asked me to draw Taylor giving a show in the rain and for the background to be blue and show cell phone lights. I liked that through simple lines I was able to achieve the effect of wet hair and a nice expression on her face” are some of the phrases she said in a video that she published on her account, which has more than 45 thousand followers.
The entire work was drawn on a tablet and the result could not be better. The fans were delighted because in addition to super original portraits of their favorite star, the book comes at a more than friendly price: between 6 and 7 thousand pesos.
Azul, in addition to his drawings in this book, illustrated several more and has a large number of works published on his website, https://azulportillo.com/ where he shows and sells his works. She defines herself as a freelance illustrator, that is, a person who works autonomously, creating with total freedom. In July 2022 she portrayed Quino, the legendary creator of Mafalda for the commemorative doodle that Google made in honor of her birth.
On November 9, 10 and 11, the City of Buenos Aires will witness shows that, like this book and its illustrator, will remain in the memory of thousands of Taylor fans in the country.
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