Taylor Swift Fans Raised Over $2 Million to Help Sea Otters

Never underestimate the allure of a good vintage t-shirt. Last week saw the theatrical release of The Official Release Party of a Showgirl, the visual companion to Taylor Swift’s album The Life of a Showgirl. Audiences responded well to the idea, with the theatrical release taking in $46 million worldwide, according to Variety. That isn’t the only way in which Swift fans showed their support for the singer-songwriter, though; there’s also an effort that wound up benefitting a California aquarium.

As Olga D. Rodriguez explained in an article for the Associated Press, Swift could be seen wearing a vintage Monterey Bay Aquarium shirt in part of the film. Certain articles of clothing achieve pop culture popularity from onscreen appearances, and this shirt was no different. Not long after the film debuted, the AP reports, Swift fans began seeking out the shift for themselves — which offered the aquarium an opportunity.

In a fundraising campaign dubbed “The Official Release Party of a T-Shirt,” the aquarium offered new versions of the shirt to people willing to donate to the aquarium’s sea otter conservation efforts. “We tracked down the original artwork — first printed in the 1990s — and are bringing it back, sustainably,” the aquarium stated on the fundraising platform Fundify.

A post on Instagram offered more details, namely that donors pledging at least $65.13 would receive one of the shirts. As the AP reported, funds from this effort will go to assist otters that have been injured or are otherwise in distress.

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How did the campaign do? So well that the aquarium ended up pausing the fundraising campaign just two days after starting it. The Tiltify page listed a fundraising goal of $1.3 million; as of now, the aquarium has raised almost double that amount, with the fundraiser currently at $2.3 million overall. “We never thought we’d hit our goal in seven hours and then almost double it in less than two days,” the aquarium stated in a followup post.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…