If you happen to find yourself at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum this summer, don’t be surprised if you see flocks of Swifties, dressed in their Eras tour costumes and wearing stacks upon stacks of friendship bracelets, rushing through the cavernous halls of the South Kensington institution. The reason? “Taylor Swift: Songbook Trail,” a new free exhibition which sees 16 of the 14-time Grammy-winning pop powerhouse’s most memorable looks—from across her music videos, tours, album covers, red-carpet appearances, and all 11 eras—go on display alongside instruments, awards, and storyboards from her personal archive, some of which have never been seen before.
Crucially, though, this isn’t one of the V&A’s standalone exhibitions, but one for which installations are dotted around the entire museum itself, with each showcase opening up a fascinating dialogue with the building’s architecture and permanent objects, and sending visitors on a thrilling treasure hunt as they wind past Renaissance sculptures, medieval tapestries, and 18th-century paintings in search of the next Swiftian curio. Each of the 13 stops—designed to be non-chronological, like the Eras tour before it—features fittingly theatrical displays crafted by Tom Piper, best known for his work for the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as for surrounding the Tower of London with poppies, while Kate Bailey, the museum’s senior curator for theater and performance, has overseen the whole project, seeding in Easter eggs and ensuring each chapter builds on our understanding of this often-mythical-seeming figure.
While Taylor herself wasn’t involved in selecting the items on show, Bailey says her archive was incredibly generous in giving her free reign, so much so that one of the main challenges was editing down her picks to just one or two garments per era. There was also the matter of timing—turning the exhibition around in only a few months, so that it could both incorporate The Tortured Poets Department era and coincide with the second leg of the Eras tour in London—and the need for collaboration. “This is something which has actually involved the whole museum,” she tells me. “I’ve been working with colleagues across different departments and engaging curators in different galleries to open up these historical spaces. And that was challenging because, in many cases, these were things we’d never done before.” Her goal, she says, was to create something that, “like Taylor’s shows, combines spectacle with that feeling of intimacy.”
The first stop on the tour is a case in point. Enter the museum through the grand archway on Cromwell Road, turn left, and make your way up two flights of stairs to the first era: Lover. Here, you’ll find the silk Versace shirt and loafers Taylor sported in her self-directed music video for “The Man” in 2020, alongside the wig and facial hair which transformed her into a millionaire playboy, her director’s chair from the set, the best-director VMA she scooped for her efforts, and a loop of the video itself.