It was rare, I was there

How The Eras Tour became synonymous with a celebration of girlhood.

I am exactly like other girls. I, like many other women this year, saw Taylor Swift live at The Eras Tour. I also watched the TikTok recaps of dates prior and after mine, I waited with baited breath to hear the notes of a surprise song through a grainy livestream. I dressed up at my date; a novelty flamingo hat procured from Flying Tiger to reference a 1989 vault track called “Slut!”. When the girls around me and my friend, Hermione, noticed our niche reference, they scurried over to give us bracelets, even though we had nothing to trade. We had flown 800 miles and taken a seven hour bus after our train from Berlin to Warsaw was cancelled. Yes, I flew to the other side of Europe for this. I knew friends who flew to other continents to experience The Eras Tour, so actually my feat to Poland was not that radical. I knew people who went to multiple shows in various different countries. All to watch Taylor Swift.

The final show of The Eras Tour happened on the 8 December. There were pockets of the internet who logged on to watch the final night of this spectacle as it unfolded in Vancouver. 149 shows, 5 continents, 10.1 million tickets sold, The Eras Tour ended with record-breaking stats: it is the highest grossing tour of all time and the second most attended. I am guessing that if you are reading this, if you yourself did not go to The Eras Tour, you knew people who did. The Eras Tour began all the way back in March of 2023. Do you know what has happened since then? March 2023 was so long ago that we thought Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn were still endgame. People have birthed children and got pregnant again. For the most part of 20 solid months The Eras Tour has punctuated my life. “What am I meant to do now it’s over?” Some Swifties are asking.

The Eras Tour is undeniably a generation defining moment. It will be remembered as the Gen-Z / Millennial equivalent of Woodstock, Live Aid, any of those rare live music experiences that for one reason or another get preserved in the history books. The American leg was recorded and turned into a film that got a theatrical release. It has been the catalyst for what I can only describe as “real world news”; anti-scalping laws, concerns about economic monopolies, diplomatic tensions, a literal political bribery scandal in the UK. We will not remember The Eras Tour for its impact on industries dominated by men; politics, trade, security. We will remember it for its impact on the people who went to see it; namely women, girls and queer people.

I am not going to sit here and say that Taylor Swift and The Eras Tour gave us a unifying, universal vision of girlhood or queerness. Absolutely not. While the tour was Taylor’s largest and went to more countries than any of her previous, it still was mostly confined to the West and Allies of the United States. Africa got no dates at all. In order to afford tickets in many of the dates, you needed a ridiculous amount of money; hotel rooms, travel and merch not included. There are unsubstantiated (yet probable) claims that many of the people who did go, especially on repeat occasions, did so because of credit cards, generational wealth, daddy’s money that is not either accessible to a majority of people, or financially wise. I only went to one date, and even I had to make some financially irresponsible decisions. I admit: what happened in August 2024 can never happen again.

However, the women who were there were part of something magical. If you were not there and have been living under a rock: The Eras Tour was a 3 hour long victory lap, celebrating Taylor Swift’s career and 10 albums, which then turned into 11 albums when she released The Tortured Poets Department in April of this year, just before the European leg of the tour began. Each album (except Debut, poor Debut) got a distinct set. The tour was a self-described exploration of Taylor Swift’s nearly 20 year long career. Each date was made extra special by the “acoustic set” where Taylor would pluck a deep cut from her catalogue and perform it acoustically. People manifested their “surprise songs”. I did. My time in Poland can only be described as my most powerful yet: I manifested that Taylor Swift would play “Red”, so I could caption my Instagram post with “loving her was czerwony”. It was mashed up with “Maroon” at my show. I did that. I manifested that.

In all seriousness, a lot of the magic at The Eras Tour was because of the fans. Taylor may have made the space for thousands of women every night to sing their hearts out but the true magic of Eras Tour came from the way fans encouraged each other to, for lack of better words, commit to the bit. People made and traded bracelets with Taylor Swift references. Fans made costumes that referenced their favourite songs or albums; later in the tour people would be seen in literal recreations of Taylor’s costumes she wore on stage.

It is hard not to compare these traditions of The Eras Tour with very real markers of girlhood. Friendship bracelets, dressing up like princesses, wasn’t this all stuff from our youth that we had surely grown out of? But there was something so irresistible about being invited to participate in these traditions as adults. Many of us had first fallen in love with Taylor when we were just girls. Fearless came out when I was 12. Taylor echoed my thoughts about early love, heartbreak and growing up, and being able to return to the music that raised me was so special. It’s no surprise that we committed to the rituals of our girlhoods in an environment architected by somebody who soundtracked them.

In some ways, the way you committed to these rituals at The Eras Tour not only emphasised how much of a good swiftie you were, but also how much of a good girl you were. If girlhood is a performance of gender then Eras Tour was a stage to perform it for yourself, and a safe place to do so. Where else would you have girls dressed in glitter casually crying their eyes out to “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”? Even if you weren’t a girl, girlhood and its traditions were celebrated so authentically at Eras. At my show, there were tons of visibly queer people in the audience who used Eras Tour as an opportunity to be visibly queer. For a lot of queer folks, this is so intrinsically tied to expressions of femininity that is often ridiculed or even forbidden by heteronormative patriarchal structures. My show was in Poland. Parts of the country infamously have declared themselves anti-LGBTQ zones. It is not an impossible suggestion to assume some fans at the shows in Warsaw could have been from these rural villages. People were incredibly loud for “shade never made anybody less gay”, showcasing that despite the discourse, Taylor has created a safe space for queer people too.

Taylor Swift becoming a safe space for girlhood was also why Taylor Swift events were targeted by extremists in the summer of 2024. Three shows in Vienna were cancelled due to a terror threat and a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport was targeted; the perpetrator murdered three girls who attended. It is no accident that both of these events were chosen: extremists are often characterised by their misogyny and contempt of girls and women. 2024 culturally was dominated by women in pop culture; The Eras Tour was a huge representation of this dominance. The fact both of these events were chosen by the perpetrators to say to women and girls: “in the spaces you created for yourself, you will never be safe” speaks volumes on how we are still fighting against the patriarchy’s desire to silence us and make us submit.

There’s a lot to be said about the aftermath of these events; it is almost unthinkable that the trigger for race riots in August was a Taylor Swift dance class and the death of three girls who were there to dance, play and be with their friends: an age appropriate version of what The Eras Tour was for me. I dressed up in my silly little flamingo hat. Me and my friend Hermione gallivanted across Europe, reminiscing the time we went to the Reputation Tour in 2018. My show happened in the week of the attack on the dance class in Southport. It was hard not to think of anything except those girls who should have felt as safe as I did.

Because I did feel safe. Ridiculously so. I am an anxious girl at the best of times but walking around Warsaw the three nights Taylor was there was unlike any other experience in any other capital city. I had never visited Poland before and even as someone who is charmingly confident with giving languages a go, Polish is still hard (to this day I can only say “thank you” and “fuck this”). Before we left, I wondered how either of us would get help if needed it. We struggled at the train station Warszawa Zachodonia, with most of the instructions in either Polish or Ukrainian, but once in centre of the city we were surrounded by crowds of young people adorned in glitter from all over the world who joined us in this pilgrimage. We walked late at night. We had no issues, which is more than can be said for my experiences in London or even walking late through my suburb of Birmingham.

In some ways, I wish I committed more to the bit of The Eras Tour. I wish me and my friends organised bracelet making evenings in preparation for our dates. I wish I found something glittery and absurdly short to wear rather than my Deafheaven t-shirt (this was not an intended choice, I had got horrifically sunburnt in Berlin and needs must). I wouldn’t change the time I had at Eras Tour, except for the fact I wish I participated more: where else can I do any of these rituals of my youth again? I won’t lie: I like a lot of music that is dominated by men and their performance of masculinity. You will not find girls dressed in short, sparkly skirts, shimmering and glittering in the pits of your local punk show or handing out niche referential friendship bracelets at shoegaze gigs. I doubt I ever will. And while other pop girls have done fantastic work on creating their own safe spaces for their queer and female fans, have any captured the sheer magic and cultural importance of The Eras Tour? I doubt it, but no doubt we will be looking for that magic in every gig forevermore.

So good-bye Eras Tour! You have been something that has been a privilege to experience. I will miss you dominating my social media feeds and providing me the opportunity to connect earnestly with women and queer people all over the world. But most importantly, Eras Tour allowed me to be a girl. It was rare, I was there, and I’ll remember it all too well.