So, did Taylor Swift steal Beyoncé’s aesthetic? Putting personal biases aside for a second (I’m a card-carrying member of the Beyhive, I ain’t sorry), let’s break down what we know. Beychella has been lauded as one of the greatest performances of all time . The show was an homage to marching bands of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and featured an almost exclusively Black cast of performers. It was, without question, an unequivocal celebration of Blackness. The event’s corresponding Netflix documentary Homecoming dropped mere weeks ago. If you have a Twitter or Instagram account (which we know both Swift and Beyoncé do) or if you have access to the Internet at all, you know that Homecoming has been one of the biggest pop culture moments of the year – heck, of the last decade. Homecoming is still very much a thing that everyone is talking about, and Taylor Swift is not dumb. Like Beyoncé, she’s one of the smartest and most strategic pop stars ever to grace the Billboard charts. She may have been planning this performance before Homecoming dropped, but she would KNOW that there would be similarities between the performances. So, she either didn’t think other people would notice (HA), knew that they would and did it anyway while anticipating that her stans would stand up for her or she thought people would recognize the parallels and respond positively, which, if true, was… optimistic.