Can we always be this close? What the hunger for intimacy with Taylor Swift says about fandom and girlhood

These days, the closest any Swiftie can get to Taylor Swift herself is the front standing section of the Eras tour. Gone are the days when she did fan meet-and-greets backstage, often sending her mum Andrea around stadiums to pick out the most enthusiastic fans. (That is, unless you’re royal progeny .) As far as I can tell, nobody has met her around the Eras dates – as the hardcore know, she may or may not get smuggled in and out inside a flight case. There have been no exclusive advance fan-listening parties for her new albums, known as the Secret Sessions, since Lover in 2019. Naturally the pandemic meant there were none for 2020’s Folklore and Evermore, yet they weren’t subsequently resumed with 2022’s Midnights, this year’s The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD) or any of the “Taylor’s Version” re-recordings in between. And yet as the possibility of being close to Swift becomes more remote, the hunger for it feels stronger than ever.

In Munich last week, an estimated 45,000 fans sat on an artificial hill outside the Olympiastadion as Swift performed to 74,000 fans inside, picnicking, trading friendship bracelets and singing along, the Frankfurter Allgemeine reported . The night unofficially became the best-attended Eras date, with a combined audience of around 113,000 – versus 96,000 in Melbourne in February; from the stage, Swift acknowledged the “beautiful people” outside.

Meanwhile, the Camden New Journal reported on a very different, much smaller and fairly literal take on grassroots Swift fandom. In June, as the Eras tour hit London, a group of six teenage girls were “spotted acting eccentrically” on Hampstead Heath, digging up soil with a spoon. When pressed by a passerby, they confessed that Swift had just sat on a nearby bench and that they wanted to keep the earth she had walked on. (Call it holy ground .) That feeling is also at the heart of the Victoria and Albert (V&A) museum’s thoughtful new walking trail of Swift’s outfits and artefacts , which places her archival pieces in conversation with the museum’s exhibits. “I presented it as feeling like she’s just left the room, which feels true to the way that she communicates with fans,” curator Kate Bailey told me. In a room of landscapes by Constable and Turner, the titular Cardigan of the song’s music video was laid on a stool next to a piano wreathed in moss, rather than mounted on a mannequin, because “it’s more expressive”, said Bailey. “There’s the sense that she’s been here, as if it’s about to come to life.”

In one sense, this desire to be in any kind of proximity to Swift is obvious: millions of people couldn’t get tickets to the Eras tour and will take any chance to be part of the action. And pop stars have always commanded communal fervour and a collector’s mentality: my teenage bedroom was a cesspit of dirty towels, broken drumsticks and setlists swiped off stages, and for a spell, I confess, a half-drunk bottle of Razorlight frontman Johnny Borrell’s water; even at the ripe age of 35, I kept a few bits of Eras tour confetti for my shoebox of memory tat. (Recall, too, the “Harry Styles puke shrine” , a fan banner at the site of a US highway spot where the boyband star reportedly threw up when drunk.) But this craving for intimacy with Swift is so extreme and full-hearted that it there has to be something more going on.

Related: Fangirls by Hannah Ewens review – beyond idolatry and lust

All this hopeful, almost desperate conjuring of her presence, the yearning to even behold the speck of her from a distant fake hilltop, made me think about two great critical texts. In The King’s Two Bodies (1957), the political theorist Ernst H Kantorowicz holds that in medieval times, kings were thought to have one physical incarnation, and would suffer and die as we all do, and one spiritual body, which transcended the earth and had the divine right to rule. It’s a concept drawn from Catholicism but equally applies to the highest echelons of pop stardom: a star such as Swift is both relatably human and divine, with followers desperate to be close to her physical form while also seeing her as having a transcendent, all-encompassing aura. It also made me revisit Hannah Ewens’ excellent book Fangirls: Scenes from Modern Music Culture, published in 2019, in particular the chapter on how central Lady Gaga’s body is to her fandom, the Little Monsters.

In Fangirls, Ewens writes that “Lady Gaga does not possess an ordinary body … she’s a living, breathing performance-art piece of wonder and revulsion”. She has often made herself available to meet fans: they know which hotels she stays in; she once sent leftovers down to a group who camped in her garage one Thanksgiving. (In Paris last week, she played fans gathered outside her hotel snippets of her as-yet-unannounced seventh album.) Fans crave these “organic” in-person meetings. “If you’re watching her at an arena, you’re probably seeing the show on a big screen … the sweat on her brow is just a Tetris block of digital pixels,” Ewens writes. “There’s nothing to be gleaned that isn’t already known.” However “by embracing her fans in real life, and inviting them to experience the bodily along with her, her own body becomes even more prized because the possibility of intimacy is there.”

Swift once cultivated that possibility. When I rewatched all of her tour documentaries for the fourth edition of Swift Notes, I noticed how approachable she was early on, both at meet and greets (which were always free, she never charged for them as many pop stars do), and by moving around the arenas in which she performed, popping up on b-stages at the far end of the room and surprising fans by legging it around the concourses to appear through random fire exits for an acoustic number. For a teenage girl who got incredibly famous incredibly fast, it felt like her way of keeping her fame tangible and not becoming remote from the fans, mostly of a similar age to her, who heard their lives reflected in her songs. There are moments of tactility in the Eras tour – the moment each night where she gives a kid at the end of the runway the hat from the Red section – but for the vast majority of Swifties, that possibility is absent for now.

To fill the gap, it feels as though fans have constructed and made themselves part of a kind of collective Swiftian body. The most intense among them know her down to the state of the sequins on her tour outfits: the progression of technology since 2019 means that the sweat on her brow ( or the snot on her top lip ) is much more visible than a “Tetris block of digital pixels”. They hungrily consume and catalogue every detail to make her more vividly real to them, such as how ratty the Reputation Eras catsuit is after more than 150 shows. They are bound together by friendship bracelets endlessly traded back and forth and laced with exuberant, niche references. Swift herself has created a sense of a shared mind with her fans, “training” them to read her cues and clues to understand her motivations and intentions and allowing them to complete her thoughts for her. A recent study also underlined the ties between Swift’s body and those of fans, concluding that her candour about her experiences with disordered eating had inspired fans “to positively change their behaviours or attitudes around eating or their body image”. More than ever, they seem like the two halves of the hand-heart that Swift holds up at shows, and fans hold back at her.

Related: Taylor Swift ‘in shock’ over Southport stabbings at Swift-themed dance class

The scenes from Munich reminded me of photos of the Lilith Fair touring festival in the 90s, in which thousands of women convened in parks across the US to watch a starry all-female bill pioneered by Sarah McLachlan. One year of its run it became the highest-grossing US touring festival, a precursor of sorts to the Eras tour’s record-breaking run: a politically significant assertion of the cultural significance of the fans, the musicians, the “girlie show”. Everyone at the Eras tour is presumably there because they are a giant Swiftie (or supervising one). But it also feels impossible not to recognise the significance of this celebration of largely female community and closeness as reproductive rights are being systematically rolled back in the US and while police have said violence against women is a “national emergency” in England and Wales . Not to mention the sickening attack on a children’s Swift-themed dance class in Southport last week, in which her music should have represented giddy, shared joy and the childhood blossoming of a relationship with pop. (In a longer statement about the tragedy, Swift said she was “completely in shock”.)

When Swifties discuss their love for their idol, they talk about how kind she is, how much she cares about them; how this tour honours and reflects the stages of their own lives. There seems to me to be a craving for that kind of pure goodness in the way Swifties are flocking towards any trace of their idol. The Munich pictures also reminded me of images of Woodstock, and Joni Mitchell’s lyric of beautifully naive optimism on the cusp of a dark new era: “We are stardust / We are golden / And we’ve got to get ourselves / Back to the garden.” A fake hill, a spoonful of soil, a moss-festooned piano: it’s all enough.