Taylor Made

KUSHI MAYUR remembers being 10 or 12 when she heard her first Taylor Swift song. A friend in school introduced her to it and the connection was instantaneous. She was soon listening to all her songs. A decade later, the 21-year-old is still lis­tening. The reason, and why she thinks of herself as a Swiftie, as fans of the sing­er across the world call themselves, is simply that it makes her feel happy. The songs talk to her. “She reinvents herself. She doesn’t stick to one genre. The kind of music she makes, everybody can relate to it,” she says.

Last year, Taylor Swift went around the world giving concerts. It was called The Eras Tour. The closest she came to India was Singapore leaving fans here wanting. But what the singer also did was make a movie about the tour that was aired in Indian theatres. Kushi, who is a copywriter in Mumbai, bought a first-day-first-show ticket at a theatre in Palladium Mall in Lower Parel. She found the theatre filled to the brim, and when the movie got rolling everyone inside started dancing. For all the Swifties there it was almost the real thing. “Everybody loves her and everybody is in the same room and then they’re all getting up and dancing to the songs. And it makes you feel like you’re in the concert,” she says.

Swift is the most popular singer in the world today. When Tortured Poets Department, her latest album with 31 tracks, came out last month, sales clocked more than two million in two weeks, and it was her eleventh album to cross two million. The music app Spotify posted on X that there were over a billion streams in a week. In every era there is one singer or band who becomes a defining cultural phenomenon jumping across borders. This is the Swift era. In India too, the generation that spans from 10 to the mid-thirties makes up the Swifties.

Dotted across India they are coming together to form communities and groups. There are Delhi Swifties, Kolkata Swifties and so on. In Kerala, it was Levi Vaguez, based in Kochi, who initiated the Kerala Swifties. Thirty-one years old now, he started listening to Swift in 2009 when he was 16. What really turned him into a fan were the lyrics of the fourth album that he found very powerful. In 2018, he formed a WhatsApp group along with someone who he had met at a wedding where together they had got the DJ to play a Swift song. “That’s how we vibed,” says Levi. “Our group remained small with about 10 members or so. Then the Eras movie came last November and we started an Instagram page. Suddenly the numbers shot up to 250.” They fol­lowed it up by conducting two events. One was a bash for Swift’s birthday in December attended by about 30-odd Swifties. In February, they met again at a bar for an adults-only Swifties meet up and even more came and not just those who were in their group. Right now, Kerala Swifties has close to 300 members.

Someone who became part of the Kerala Swifties last year was Fathima Abdul Kader, a 29-year-old lifestyle and culture writer also from Kochi. She was around 15 when she came across Swift’s music, timed to the track ‘Fifteen’ by the singer. But in her early 20s, Fathima grav­itated away from the music. She now wanted to be a hipster, and so she turned to alternative music and singers like Bon Iver. In 2020, she suddenly ran into a track ‘Exile’ where Swift was singing with Iver. She started listening to Swift again and became a full-on fan once more. “Her lyrical intelligence is what has always stood out for me from the get-go. Even when I was very young, what I loved was her songwriting. I thought Taylor Swift was average as a vocalist when she began, but her writing was great. But over the years she’s worked really, really hard and her vocals have become amazing now,” she says. She believes there has been an evolution of Swift through her music that fans have also been able to resonate with. Swift shares a part of her life through her music that fans find very relatable. When they go through experiences in their life they identify with her music. “Every single pivotal moment that I’ve lived through, like a heartbreak, losing a friend, there are Taylor Swift songs that I resonate with. There’s also the fact that she literally writes about the community that loves her. Brings them into the fold. So there is a line from a song that says ‘make friendship bracelets,’ and people make friendship bracelets every time they go to Taylor Swift concerts and give them to each other. Even at the concert movie, we did that. I gave one to Levi the first time we met in person.”

Friendship bracelets are also one of the many things that Bengaluru-based 25-year-old Pratham Junius Ruffus sells in a business that he is creating around Swift merchandise. He has been a Swiftie for about seven years now. The idea for the business came to him when he was himself looking for merchandise of the singer, like T-shirts. Swift has her own official merch that can be bought from her website but Ruffus realised that it was both extremely costly and not very accessible. “Even a T-shirt would be like around 6,000, 7,000 bucks. It has to get shipped from the US, so including delivery fee and everything, you’ll end up spending ₹10,000 to get a very simple T-shirt and it takes almost a month or two to reach,” he says.

He found online stores selling merch but realised the goods were substandard. Ruffus had started an apparel business in college before Covid, so he had the contacts. A consultant focusing on marketing for startups, he decided as an experiment to start Swiftie India, an online merch store. He spoke to friends who were Swifties to gauge de­mand and started off with T-shirts, hood­ies and jackets. His most unique product is a friendship bracelet kit. “It is part of the lore for Swifties to make friendship bracelet kits. We have a special kit that has beads, threads, hooks and everything you need to make to make around 50 friendship bracelets,” he says. It is his bestselling product priced at ₹599. He gives free stickers along with products and even that borrows into Swift’s histo­ry. Because her music keeps evolving, it has been categorised into different eras. “Everyone has their own favourite era. So what we do is when someone places an order, we ask them what their favourite era is. And based on it, we send them a free sticker set,” he says.

“There is a line from a Taylor Swift song that says ‘make friendship bracelets,’ and people make friendship bracelets every time they go to her concerts and give them to each other,” says Fathima Abdul Kader, Kochi-based Swiftie

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USING ANOTHER ELEMENT of Swift, Pratham started an add-on service connecting Swifties to each other. “Those who come on our website will find a product called Swiftie Pal. You choose your favourite era and give us your email id. We will connect you with another Swiftie somewhere in India anonymously who also has the same like. We send a chat link where both are anonymous. They can access that link and no personal information is shared. If they hit it off then they can take their conversation to WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. We don’t charge for it and it has been very successful. Every day we get people signing up for it and we keep connecting them with each other.” His customers are diverse in age. Swifties are young but he finds a lot of parents buying merch for their children as gifts for occa­sions like birthdays.

While the age demography spans decades, Swift’s fans relate to her music in different ways. In Fathima’s observa­tion, the younger ones are more zealous and let it overtake their identity in some ways whereas for the older ones, it is just another aspect of their personality. This also plays some part when it comes to dealing with those who think that Swift is overrated. It can lead to fractious arguments. The Kerala Swifties have seen their group being invaded by trolls multiple times. Ironically, it gained in intensity after the concert movie because earlier there wasn’t so much awareness about Swift, her music and her fans. Her popularity, or the idea of her popularity, became suddenly mainstream as op­posed to being the subculture that it was before. “People in Kerala or Tier 2 cities suddenly realised that there was a mu­sician called Taylor Swift and there is a fan base around this female artist. People also have an assumption that it is mostly young women and not just across all ages and genders. We had boys come into the group and say her music is terrible. We had somebody sending weird inappro­priate messages. They were annoyed and basically acting out. They will say what they want to say. It’s fine. There are some fans who react. We don’t,” says Fathima.

Do Swifties eventually outgrow Swift? Fathima doesn’t think it is necessarily so because Swift herself changes. She takes her own example where from the age of 15 to 20 she was a Swiftie and then felt that the music was too mainstream. But then Swift’s music evolved. “It is one of the reasons I feel I came back into the fan fold because with folklore (that became part of Swift’s music), the things that she was talking about weren’t just rosy-eyed delusions of first love or heartbreak and innocence. It was about being betrayed by people who you thought you could trust with your life, like your best friends. Or there is a song that’s an ode to her grandmother. So her tone and language matured as well. If she continues to mature with her albums like she is doing now, I feel I might grow with her music as well, provided I still resonate with it.”

Kushi too doesn’t think it necessary for fans to turn away from Swift just because they become older. “She will keep writing songs about her life as she gets older. When she gets married, she will write about that. She’ll have children and probably she’ll write songs about that. That’s what’s gonna make us listen to her. I think more than her music, I love her as a person. She has a way to connect with her audience. Even in a concert, she makes it feel like it is just us two in the room.”

About The Author

Madhavankutty Pillai

Madhavankutty Pillai has no specialisations whatsoever. He is among the last of the generalists. And also Open chief of bureau, Mumbai  

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