In the mid-2010s, you couldn’t open a magazine or scroll through social media without seeing them: a dazzling, leggy phalanx of supermodels, actresses, and singers, all flanking their golden-haired leader, Taylor Swift. They were the “Girl Squad”, an elite club of “it girls” who dominated Fourth of July parties, award show red carpets, and, most famously, the explosive, high-budget music video for “Bad Blood”. For a few shining years, they weren’t just a friend group; they were a cultural phenomenon, the living embodiment of the millennial hashtag #SquadGoals.

But as quickly as it materialized, the squad vanished. The united front fractured, the public appearances stopped, and the very concept of the “squad” became a pop culture punchline, a relic of a bygone era. What happened? Was it the natural drifting of friends, or was it something far more calculated—a catastrophic implosion of a brand that became too toxic to sustain? A deep dive into the squad’s history reveals a complex, deliberate strategy, one that ultimately buckled under the weight of its own artifice.

To understand the squad’s fall, one must first understand its creation. Before 2014, Taylor Swift’s public image was not that of a feminist den mother. It was dominated by her romantic life, a narrative she ultimately found suffocating. The media, she felt, had reduced her to a “serial dater” who, as comedians joked, went through men and wrote songs about them. The 1989-era rebrand was her direct response. “I’ll make one about moving to New York and deciding that really my life is more fun with just my friends,” she said.

Simultaneously, “feminism” was becoming a mainstream, marketable trend. Swift, who had previously skirted the label, did a public 180, a shift she credited to her new friendship with Girls creator Lena Dunham. Dunham, she claimed, “made me realize that I’ve been taking a feminist stance without actually saying so”. This new, “empowered” identity became the ideological glue for the squad. It was a legion of female friends designed to “support, uplift, and empower each other”, a powerful “sisterhood” that, as Swift proudly told Vanity Fair, was more important than “some guy that it didn’t work out with”.

This new brand required a new cast. The squad was a carefully curated hierarchy. At the top were the OG, non-famous friends like Abigail Anderson, who kept Swift “grounded”. Next were long-term industry friends like Selena Gomez, her “only friend in the industry” for a time. But the most visible, and most crucial, layer was the “famous yet quickly match recruited friends”.

This group consisted almost entirely of supermodels—Karlie Kloss, Gigi Hadid, Cara Delevingne, Martha Hunt—many of whom Swift met during her performances at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, a venue that felt like “a casting couch” for the squad. This was friendship as public spectacle. The relationship with Karlie Kloss was a prime example, culminating in a shared Vogue cover in 2015. The article wasn’t promoting a project; it was promoting the friendship itself, commodifying it. The message, as Vogue itself wrote, was that “Swift is by all accounts an amazing person to be friends with”.

The squad’s power and branding reached its apex on May 17, 2015, with the release of the “Bad Blood” music video. This was not just a song; it was a “quasi movie trailer” and a masterful piece of brand synergy. It cemented her real-life friends as a fictional, badass army, with cameos from models, actresses, and even supermodel Cindy Crawford. It broke YouTube records and won Video of the Year at the VMAs, an award Swift accepted surrounded by the entire, on-stage squad. This was the peak. It was also the beginning of the end.

While America loves to build up successful women, it is “even more obsessed with their destruction”. The backlash was twofold. First, the “Bad Blood” video, widely known to be about Katy Perry, started to look less like “feminist empowerment” and more like a high-budget “mean girls” operation. Critics like Demi Lovato called it out directly: “I think that having a song and a video about tearing Katy Perry down… that’s not woman’s empowerment”. This gave rise to the idea of “feminism Taylor’s version”—an apolitical, self-serving brand of sisterhood that only applied to those who served her.

The second, and perhaps more damaging, criticism was of the squad’s staggering lack of diversity. It was, as critics noted, “pretty much one dress size and one skin tone”. Rowan Blanchard, star of Girl Meets World, said “Feminism and friendship are supposed to be inclusive, and most of these squads are strictly exclusive”. This “exclusivity” shattered the “relatable girl next door” brand Swift had built her career on. To her old fans, it suddenly looked like Taylor had “ditched her friends to hang out with the popular girls”, the very girls she once defined herself against. The “inspirational” group now felt “aspirational” and “unattainable”.

But the “game-ending move” that truly killed the squad came from an outside source: Kim Kardashian. In 2016, after Swift publicly denounced Kanye West’s “Famous” lyric, Kim Kardashian “escalated the feud” by releasing edited clips of the phone call where Swift seemingly approved the song. The internet erupted. The “#TaylorSwiftIsOverParty” trended, and her comment sections were flooded with snake emojis.

Taylor Swift vanished from the public eye for a year. The squad, which “thrived on paparazzi photo ops and social media posts,” vanished with her. In this new landscape, “lines were drawn in the sand”. You were either Team Taylor or Team Kimye. For many squad members, continued public allegiance was a career risk. Kendall Jenner, Kim’s sister, was obviously Team Family. Karlie Kloss, managed by Scooter Braun—who was also Kanye’s manager and would later become Swift’s arch-nemesis—was in an impossible position.

A great “distancing” began. Members who were once proud to be included now wanted out. Zendaya, a cameo in “Bad Blood,” liked tweets clarifying she was never actually friends with Taylor. Hailee Steinfeld, once a core member, suddenly downplayed the relationship: “I think people think we spent a lot more time together than we actually do”. Lorde infamously compared her friendship with Swift to “someone with an autoimmune disease”. The message was clear. They were, in Swift’s own future words, “very much like to be excluded from this narrative”. The squad brand was now radioactive.

Today, the girl squad is a memory. Taylor Swift’s friendship circle is “a lot smaller” and, crucially, a lot more private. She still has close friends—Selena Gomez, Gigi Hadid, Blake Lively—but their hangouts are kept “offline”. After her breakup with Joe Alwyn, paparazzi did capture her walking with her friends, a rare sighting, but it was a fleeting echo of the past, not a return to the brand.

The rise and fall of the Girl Squad serves as a potent cultural lesson. It was a brand built for a specific time and a specific purpose—a rebrand that was wildly successful until it wasn’t. The narrative of “sisterhood” it sold was, in the end, too exclusive, too perfect, and too weaponized to be believable. And yet, a final question lingers: If a group of famous, successful men—like the “Rat Pack” of the 1960s—publicly supported each other, would they have faced the same accusations of being “damaging” or “a cult”? Or was the intense, vitriolic backlash against the squad also fueled by a deep-seated “internal misogyny” that remains uncomfortable with a powerful, united group of women? The answer, like the squad itself, is complicated.