A lens into the young UK Swiftie fandom, photographer Giulia Frigieri captures the uniquely intimate relationship between the global Millennial megastar and her generation-spanning audience.

“I felt like I belonged. I felt so safe.” Anjali, 15, is remembering her experience last summer at Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. “I miss the concert, but I really miss the community, I miss the space. I wrote a whole page in my journal about how great it was.”

 

Beside her, her younger sister, India, 13, nods. “I think a big part of the Eras Tour was just standing outside the stadium and trading bracelets, talking to people. You could ask total strangers their favourite song, and it wasn’t awkward. You didn’t know their name, but you knew their favourite era.”

Anjali and India have just come out of having their pictures taken for the shoot. We’re sitting on a couch as girls pass through, clutching pink cowboy hats and shedding sequins with every step. The entirety of Taylor Swift’s discography thrums a pulsing heartbeat in the next room, and every few minutes the interview has to be put on pause so that a particularly beloved chorus or bridge can be sung or danced to. Anjali is in a pink crochet dress and India in an Eras Tour t-shirt with butterfly-appliqué blue jeans. To even a casual Swiftie, it’s obvious that their chosen colour palettes and details reference Lover and Debut (the fans’ name for Taylor’s self-titled first self-titled album), respectively.

 

But no one here today is casual about Taylor Swift.

“We all went to different schools after primary school, but Taylor Swift connected us,” says Molly, 13. She’s sitting next to her best friend Tyla, both of them in homemade t-shirts, decorated painstakingly with rainbow fabric markers. Molly’s t-shirt is a careful replica of the one Taylor wears in the music video for ‘You Belong With Me’, which came out in 2008, before Molly was even born. Tyla’s t-shirt, which she made with her mum the night before her Eras Tour concert, depicts every era of Swift’s career, a lovingly-made version of the official tour merch.

 

Molly, Tyla, and their primary school friends started “a Swiftie WhatsApp group”. Tyla smiles: “I don’t think we would chat as much without it, because school is so busy, but Taylor Swift is always there for us,” Molly says.

  • Tayla wears her own handmade t shirt

Taylor Swift is many things: a billionaire, a record-breaker, a celebrity powerhouse, and, arguably, the most famous person in the world. But to many of her fans, she’s also the connective tissue that stretches across the divides of growing up and leaving childhood behind.

 

For Poppy, 17, there’s a strong nostalgic element to these songs. “I got into Taylor through my big sister, she says, her pink cowboy hat by her feet. “It was our thing. We watched all the music videos together.” Her childhood best friend is also a Swiftie, and the two of them recently attended Swiftogeddon, a glittery DJ night which exclusively plays Taylor Swift for hours and hours. It was this full circle moment, because we used to listen to her when we were younger. I think I’d be less into her now if my best friend wasn’t, but now we rehash [all our old] memories by listening to Taylor.”

 

What is it about Taylor’s songs that forge these deep connections? This summer in London, for eight nights across June and August, the tired-eyed commuters on the Metropolitan line to Wembley Park were replaced by hundreds of thousands of Swifties, singing songs to each other, swapping friendship bracelets, and complimenting each other on their outfits. Every night, on stage, Taylor Swift would tell the audience that while the songs she was about to play might have once reminded them of hard times, after tonight, when you hear these songs out and about in the world, you’re going to think about tonight and the memories we made together!” She would then launch into ‘Lover’, once a love song to a single person, but now a dedication to millions: “Can we always be this close, forever and ever?“

Beyond the awards and the records, this is Taylor’s most enduring creation: an emotional space in which these teenage girls feel safe and understood. For Molly and Tyla, the music is so much more than a handful of heartbreak anthems or love ballads. “I don’t find these songs [literally] relatable,” says Tyla, who now writes and performs her own music (and, inspired by Taylor Swift, has bought a typewriter to write her first novel). “I associate my own feelings to them.”

 

“Who doesn’t like screaming ‘All Too Well (10 Minute Version)’?” says Molly. “And I’ve never even experienced what the song is about! Yeah, like I’ve never dated Jake Gyllenhaal!” They collapse into giggles. It’s this girlhood, this coming-of-age, that connects Swifties and Taylor Swift herself: from heartbreak to grief, friendship to fallouts, her discography captures it all and offers a safety net of support through the most universal thing of all, music.

 

Taylor Swift’s latest album The Tortured Poet’s Department: The Anthology is out now, listen below.