I am obliged to open this piece by stating that this is not a Swift-Approved article. With that obligation out of the way: there is a lot going on for Taylor Swift lately. First, her ongoing Eras tour, described as “intimate, colossal and slightly disappointing” by Richard Brady for the New Yorker, words no woman wishes to hear. Swift also has many ongoing feuds with celebrity exes following her bold decision to settle for a corn-fed American man after a decade of dating nigh-exclusively Englishmen. More darkly, Swift recently has had a near miss with an Islamic State (ISIS) inspired terror plot “using explosives and knives”; orchestrated by 3 teenagers and foiled by the Viennese authorities. Taylor doubtless has some anguish relating to the Swift-themed children’s dance party, at which another teenager lethally stabbed to death 3 children and wounded 8 others in Southport, England. This inspired the subsequent rioting and reactive descent of the UK into a judiocracy, in which online words have parity in criminal law with offline acts and could land you three years in prison. Taylor Swift clearly has a lot on her plate.

This article isn’t strictly about that. This article is about the Victoria & Albert Museum — founded for educational purposes during the high-industrial excess of the British Empire, and a stone’s throw from my Englishman’s hovel — hosting Taylor Swift’s Songbook Trail from July 28th 2024. The Trail is a free, temporary installation; a series of 13 mixed-media tableaux, smattered throughout the V&A, celebrating the artistic and stylistic oeuvre of Taylor Swift as she moves, Bowie-like, from era to era. Naturally, in the spirit of Swift’s Eras tour. To the layperson, the primary focus appears to be on Swift’s fashion, but to the Swfitie, to whom she is “more popular than Jesus”, it is of course more than that. 

Swift is nothing if not reflective in this collaboration with Tom Piper, even a little prophetic. The penultimate installation, titled The Tortured Poets Department, is also the title of Swift’s most recent 16-track album, released April 2024. This installation sits beside Vincenzo Foggini’s sculpture of Samson, in heroic motion, about to beat two Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. I am informed this was not deliberate, but is an interesting comment on Swift-Philistines’ attitudes to her work, and the manner in which Songbook Trail-takers seemed to ignore the existence of the rest of the V&A’s contents. That said, I have also never seen the V&A so full. This tableaux shows a mannequin, clad in an all-black, Lolita-styled Victorian mourning dress, a pile of leather bound books at its feet, framed by fluttering papers which are set into motion by four ceiling fans, suspended above the scene. The Romantic presentation of Swift as a tortured, lovesick artist are plain here to the layman. The dress and papers are iconographic references to Swift’s music video for the song Fortnight, containing lyrics like “all my Mondays are stuck in an endless February”. She seems a little sad. As one observer of Swift’s music on Mumsnet put it “It is a bit ‘Oh for god’s sake get a grip!’ to my mind but some is pretty good”. I am inclined to agree. The Tortured Poets Department itself is a fictitious government body, dedicated to the capture and clinical observation of such artists; something out of dystopian science fiction. Both the installation, and associated video, could not be more on the nose about presenting Swift as a misunderstood and brooding figure, worthy of the attention of global states. This is of course, all before Swift’s accidental role in descending England into chaos following a mass stabbing. Perhaps Sir Keir Starmer should study Taylor Swift, if he hasn’t already.

Stop 13 on the Songbook Trail is titled simply Childhood. Its poignance post-dates its creation. There is no costume. There is only a series of old photographs and home videos of a young Swift, often flanked by her parents. These hang, bleakly, on plain metal struts, reminiscent of a memorial slideshow. There are no flowers though. The metal struts incidentally suspend a grand, late Elizabethan façade, removed from the house of Sir Paul Pindar in the grandiose Anglo-classical style, emblazoned with heraldry in its bays. It would not look out of place on a prodigy house such as Burleigh. A stark symbol of from humble beginnings leading to grand things for now-billionaire Swift. Other childhood music lovers, Swifties specifically, have not been so fortunate. 

Former Chief Crown Prosecutor Nazir Afzal OBE recently commented on the Swift Stabbings; he sidestepped any talk relating to mass immigration, or Islamic terror, saying “we’re missing the misogyny here”. Only days later, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper had ordered a review of the counter-terrorism strategy to address violence against women and girls. It would be unusual if COBRA (Cabinet Office Briefing Room A) had not discussed Taylor Swift in recent weeks. Swift may just get her Tortured Poets Department yet, just not the one she imagined. Mr Afzal also sat as the Chief Executive of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners during the ISIS bombing of an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, which killed 22 and wounded over 1000. ISIS’s statement on this described Ariana Grande fans as “crusaders” at a “shameless” concert. I doubt Islamic terrorists view Swifties much differently, and her recent brush with a similar attack on her Eras tour in Vienna suggests as such; Starmer should take heed. 

The Songbook Trail was, of course, opened before this transpired. Tom Piper, the man responsible for the feng shui of these 13 monuments to Swift is a theatrical set designer whose style can best be described as an grimdark answer to the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico — on display in his work on Nora. Piper’s sets are frequently industrial, claustrophobic yet surprisingly open spaces — dappled in searchlight-white light that would spell disaster for people with seasonal affective disorder. His work in Rhinoceros and Long Days Journey are metallic and oppressive spaces. Disjointed but familiar forms; scaffolds, doors, strewn disembodied furniture populate his landscapes like the dead trees of no-man’s land. A lot of his work looks like AI image generators from 2022, and given the prompt “moody room”. It is edgy stuff. This then begs the question — why on earth has he selected to collaborate on a project celebrating perhaps one of the most misquoted and Mumsnet-approved international popstar Taylor Swift. Further to the point, why should this juxtaposing collaboration be set in a venerable Victorian museum — the apotheosis of high-industrial excess of Empire. 

My thinking is simple. The V&A is one of Britain’s great artistic collections that has not been adulterated by the usual trends of the museum world. Allow me to explain why Songbook Trail is an example of why. In the passing decade we have seen museums used by curators as the battlegrounds of our ideological times, frequently daubing them in explanatory material motivated (what has been termed) the woke intersectional politics of the day. This produces embarrassingly non-functional museums. The V&A was established for the purposes of education in design, not political re-education on the subject. Pompous curators continually treat the public as morons, a tabula rasa, ripe for political re-education. The only casualty is the museum itself. 

An Imperial institution like the V&A would be ripe pickings for any radical curator with an agenda, something already occurring in the National Maritime Museum, discussed here by David Abulafia,  Emeritus Professor of Mediterranean History at the University of Cambridge. Lara Brown, Policy researcher & Civic Future fellow recently commented on the rebranding of George Gilbert Scott’s Albert Memorial, in nearby in Hyde Park, as “offensive” as it “reflects a “Victorian view of European supremacy” by the Royal Parks. As Brown suggests, this was in ignorance of the Government’s “Retain and Explain” guidance for custodians. Yet the V&A remains insulated.

The reason is, the V&A has had sensible responses to this trend. Take for example the appointment of Zewditu Gebreyohanes as a trustee of the V&A in 2022; Gebreyohanes formerly acted as the Director of Restore Trust, a group keen to preserve the integrity of the National Trust’s purpose, as a legal trust, on which historic objects and houses are held for the nation, at the “advice and encouragement of the Museums Association, the NCVO and similar-minded groups”, not a political playground. She is capably continuing that work at the V&A. She is in good company with other recent trustee appointments such as Rosalind Polly Blakesley, Professor of Russian and European Art and Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, who diplomatically led talks with activists seeking to decolonise Cambridge’s Art & Architectural History department in 2018. To quote her, “my clear message during that meeting [is] that no one should ever feel coerced to support a particular agenda”.

Swift is a vehicle, through which young women may vicariously date a variety of high-profile Englishmen

This mentality is why the V&A has survived such narratives by separating its events from its permanent collection. It has inoculated itself from the “queering” of maps of the British Empire and designs for the Crystal Palace by relegating such activities to temporary events – like the LGBTQIA+ Tour of 2023. This is sensible — such efforts are simply lenses through which to view objects, they are not intrinsically the objects themselves. The V&A has quietened calls to decolonise it by repositioning itself as the “home of camp” through fashion, an undoubtedly camp sphere — it just so happens to hold the national collection of textiles and fashion, which includes more than 75,000 items spanning more than 5,000 years, from Predynastic Egypt to the present day. That’s where Songbook Trail comes in. A collaboration between a global popstar and a theatrical set designer, focusing on her costumes. Swift is camp, she’s twee even, but unlike the trend of radical political attacks on England’s museums and cultural intuitions, she’s popular, relatable even. By the close of this article, even I have found myself enjoying the song Fortnight’s refrain. Millions of others must too, Fortnight’s other lyrics are so sporadic that millions can.

Swift is a vehicle, through which young women may vicariously date a variety of high-profile Englishmen (and the occasional American, to her discredit). In many ways, she is the unlikely everywoman. Taylor Swift’s Anglo-centric dating habits are frequently the wellspring from which the rich tapestry, her music, over many inward-looking “eras” and costumes, is derived. Vienna and Southport remind us that Swifties, in their strange fixation, have become a target for those with malign intentions toward the UK — in a certain way, the V&A has too. Both have resisted in a manner that I find admirable, perhaps both are in their “fearless era” in response to this (a real Taylor Swift era, explained in stop 5 of the Songbook Trail). In a sense, Songbook Trail is perfectly suited to the V&A’s current purposes of artistic resistance, and fits into the purposes of its foundation. I might even go so far as to suggest that Songbook Trail is a story about the British Empire, which sent many an Englishman to perilous places. Songbook Trail isn’t just for Swifties, it represents more than that.