i <3 t.s.

Tom Hiddleston Finally Explains That Taylor Swift Tank Top

Tom Hiddleston and Taylor Swift. Photo: Newspix/Newspix via Getty Images

Required celebrity-gossip reading for this morning is this just-published, in-depth profile of onetime Taylor Swift boyfriend Tom Hiddleston, written by the incomparable Taffy Brodesser-Akner for GQ. In it, Hiddleston addresses his whirlwind, extremely public relationship with Swift for the first time since they ended it last summer. Brodesser-Akner gets right to the point: Was the relationship real? Hiddleston says — emphatically — Yes: “Of course it was real.” Then he explains why he wore a tank top that said “I <3 T.S.” on it in full view of the paparazzi on the 4th of July:

“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. And I wanted to protect the graze from the sun and said, ‘Does anyone have a T-shirt?’ And one of her friends said, ‘I’ve got this.’” The friend pulled out the “I ♥ T.S.” tank top that Taylor’s friends are contractually obligated to own. “And we all laughed about it. It was a joke.”
So that’s his statement on the entire relationship: an explanation of the tank top. “It was a joke,” he repeats. “Among friends.”

That’s not all Hiddleston has to say about Swift; in fact, he met Brodesser-Akner before her early-morning flight back to the States so he could keep explaining “Hiddleswift” and the nature of fame to her. Read the full story here.

Tom Hiddleston Finally Explains That Taylor Swift Tank Top