Benjamin Button

A music-video set adoption

Benjamin Button, a cream-coloured Ragdoll kitten, joined Taylor Swift's household in March 2019 after appearing during the shoot for the music video of the single "ME!", recorded with Brendon Urie of Panic! at the Disco. Swift has described the adoption in interviews including the May 2019 Time 100 feature: the kitten was a prop animal supplied by a Los Angeles cat agency for the scene in which Swift hands a cat to Urie; once filming concluded she asked the trainer whether she could take him home. The cat is named for the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, adapted into the 2008 David Fincher film starring Brad Pitt.

Time magazine cover

Within weeks of joining the household Benjamin Button appeared on the 25 April 2019 cover of Time magazine, photographed by Pari Dukovic, balanced on Swift's shoulder for the Time 100 Most Influential People issue. The cover was widely circulated on social media and is sometimes cited as the youngest age at which a household cat has appeared on a major American news magazine cover. The kitten was approximately seven weeks old in the cover shoot.

A Ragdoll alongside two Scottish Folds

Benjamin Button is the third of Swift's cats and the first non-Scottish-Fold, joining the older Meredith Grey (adopted 2011) and Olivia Benson (adopted 2014). The Ragdoll breed was developed in the 1960s by California breeder Ann Baker and is characterised by a calm, person-tolerant temperament — qualities that have made the cat photographable across the multiple Swift studio albums released since 2019 (Lover, folklore, evermore, Midnights, and The Tortured Poets Department), with regular cameo appearances in studio-process photographs released through Swift's Instagram account. He has also accompanied Swift on the private flights connecting the legs of the Eras Tour between 2023 and 2024 according to several short-form videos released by her management.