Swift onboarded each member of the tribe in a different manner: Dunham and Swift first connected on Twitter in 2012; Swift met Kloss at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show a year later; most of us became aware of the model Martha Hunt when she started appearing in various Swift dinner-party Instagrams this winter. But the group’s true coronation as a pop-cultural force came this spring, with the blockbuster music video for Swift’s “Bad Blood,” in which more than a dozen members of her posse made cameos. “She was being a boss bitch that day,” Delevingne says of the video shoot, which Swift produced. “She got everyone together. It was just amazing to see her in her element.” Swift, who was 16 years old when her first album, Taylor Swift, was released, has spoken before about her lack of close friends growing up (“I first started writing songs because I didn’t really have anyone else to talk to”), so it’s easy to see her shepherding this squad as an attempt at constructing that high-school experience she never had. Now she doesn’t just have a table to sit at in the cafeteria—she has a dozen tables.

These girls are not shuffling out of clubs at three A.M. or finding themselves on TMZ for nefarious reasons. Delevingne tells me that a typical night with their cohort involves Swift dressing her friends in “white Victorian nighties,” purchased by Swift at Nashville antique store Gilchrist Gilchrist. Swift has a cupboard of them, Delevingne says, adding, “She’s also great at cooking breakfast.” (“I absolutely slay omelets,” Swift says.) Gomez concurs that their meet-ups are generally low-key: “We go to her house and hang out or cook or we go out to dinner.” Swift is not straitlaced (she says people will sometimes mistakenly assume, upon meeting her, that she “never has a drink and goes to church five times a week”), but she is not exactly a Miley Cyrus either. During lunch, as Swift and I eat salads, someone points out that Swift has a piece of food on her chin, and she announces, “I can never tell when I have food on my face … or when someone’s high. That’s why I can’t go to Coachella or Glastonbury.”

While one might think someone at Swift’s level of fame—who can cause a tabloid commotion with a mere frown at an awards show or a slightly unusual choice in post-gym attire—would be cautious about sharing her secrets, Swift says she has proof that her group of friends can be fully trusted. “I do not give an edited version of myself to my friends. [And] anytime I read one of those tabloid articles that says, ‘A source close to Swift says,’ it’s always incorrect. None of my friends are talking, and they know everything.”

When I ask if there is ever friction between any members of her diverse clique, Swift shakes her head vigorously. “That doesn’t happen. We even have girls in our group who have dated the same people. It’s almost like the sisterhood has such a higher place on the list of priorities for us. It’s so much more important than some guy that it didn’t work out with. When you’ve got this group of girls who need each other as much as we need each other, in this climate, when it’s so hard for women to be understood and portrayed the right way in the media … now more than ever we need to be good and kind to each other and not judge each other—and just because you have the same taste in men, we don’t hold that against each other.” A few days after our conversation, she posts a picture on her Instagram showcasing a riverboat double date on the Thames, chaperoned by Kloss. In the shot: Swift; Swift’s boyfriend, Scottish D.J. Calvin Harris; Hadid; and Joe Jonas, Hadid’s current boyfriend, who dated Swift in 2008 (and famously dumped her during a 27-second phone call).

Hit Parade

Swift has had the kind of 12 months that other pop stars would poison people for. In August of 2014, she released the single “Shake It Off,” which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned three Grammy nominations. Her fifth album, 1989, arrived two months later, in October, and sold 1.287 million copies in its first week. It went on to become the top-selling album in the U.S. in 2014 and is now the most successful of her career. Swift says this album, her first to feature exclusively pop songs (as opposed to the full-on country and country-tinged pop that made up her first few albums), is the one she “likes the most.” It “feels the most sonically cohesive [of all my albums],” she says. “I couldn’t be more proud of it.”