An Era of Our Own

Taylor Swift didn’t bring the Eras Tour to India, but the Swifties brought it into the theatres in Chennai.

I knew I was in the right theatre before I even reached the screen. There were girls in sequined dresses, friendship bracelets stacked around their wrists, and flashes of glitter wherever I looked. Some had dressed for specific Taylor Swift eras; others had simply arrived wearing whatever made them feel like a Swiftie. People were greeting friends, comparing bracelets, taking photographs and talking excitedly about the songs they were about to hear.

It was November 3, 2023, and I had come to the theatre to watch Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, the concert film documenting Swift’s record-breaking tour. I had expected a cinema. What I walked into felt much closer to a concert venue.

When the concert film arrived in Indian theatres, it brought with it more than two hours of Taylor Swift performing songs from almost two decades of her career. It also brought friendship bracelets, glitter, costumes, chants, screaming, dancing and, apparently, very little interest in behaving like a normal cinema audience. Across India, theatres became temporary concert venues. In Chennai, Swifties turned watching a concert film into an act of participation.

Inside the theatre, people sang along to songs that had accompanied them for years. They shouted familiar lines, reacted to the appearances of particular songs and recognised references that would have meant nothing to someone outside the fandom. The screen showed Taylor moving through her career, but the audience was constantly responding to what those songs meant to them.

To a Swiftie, The Eras Tour was never simply a concert film. It was a retrospective, moving through the different versions of Taylor Swift that had existed across her career. But it was also a retrospective of the people watching her. Every era was an album, and every album had the possibility of carrying a memory with it.

That became particularly clear when I spoke to Andy, who had gone to see the film despite not being a Swiftie himself. He had expected people to sit quietly, watching the concert with their mouths wide open. Instead, he found himself surrounded by crowds dressed in bright colours, some with little face tattoos and others covered in glitter.

“They had some unified claps going on, and I realized this wasn’t going to be just another movie,” Andy told me. “I didn’t know these songs, but I settled down to people-watch. People reacted differently to each song.”

I was sitting next to him and started explaining what different songs meant to me and which moments in my life they represented. I told him about how 1989 was my introduction to Taylor, and how Back to December was my heartbreak’s song. Wildest Dreams was the song I would sing to my friend, whose boyfriend was ‘tall and handsome as hell.’

He was watching Taylor Swift on the screen, but he was also watching somebody remember herself.

That, perhaps, is what made the experience so strange for an outsider. To someone unfamiliar with the music, a theatre full of people crying over a woman on a screen might seem excessive. But to the people in those seats, the songs were not just songs. A part of each fan’s life corresponded with each one. Taylor was moving through her career while the audience was moving through their own lives with her.

An album could be an entire chapter: a year at school, a friendship, a first love, a breakup, lockdown, or simply a version of yourself you had forgotten existed. The Eras Tour gave those memories a sequence. As Taylor changed costumes and moved from one album to another, thousands of people were, in their own way, moving backwards through their own lives.

And they weren’t particularly interested in hiding it.

The screenings were filled with fans singing loudly, dancing in their seats and aisles, screaming lyrics and crying through songs. They came dressed as different eras. They exchanged friendship bracelets. They knew the little chants and gestures that had become part of the global Swiftie experience. For a few hours, the rules of the cinema seemed to change. You weren’t supposed to be quiet. You weren’t supposed to sit still. You were supposed to know every word.

Sure, you could call this fangirling. But that word doesn’t quite encompass what was happening.

“Fangirling” often carries the suggestion that someone cares too much: that the screaming is excessive, the emotion embarrassing, the obsession slightly ridiculous. Yet inside these screenings, that enthusiasm was the point. Many of the girls and women there had grown up with Taylor. For some, this was the closest they had ever come to experiencing the Eras Tour in person. They could finally be as loud about their love for her as they had always wanted to be.

Andy told me he “had to take a breath to remember that all of this was happening in a theatre in Chennai, not a live concert. It sure seemed like one.” He didn’t understand half the references, he said, “but I understood that these people were remembering themselves as they watched Taylor.”

That distinction matters. The film gave Chennai Swifties a Taylor Swift concert, but the audience gave each other the experience of going to one. Strangers already knew the same songs. They recognised the same costumes, the same jokes and the same gestures. For a few hours, an online and international fandom became something physical: people sitting beside one another, singing together in a dark room in Chennai.

I entered the theatre expecting to move through Taylor’s past with her, carrying my own memories from one album to the next. What I hadn’t expected was for that private experience to become completely collective. Everyone in the theatre seemed to be doing the same thing, and everyone was completely open to sharing it.

An era is a period in Taylor’s career, but it can also be a name we give to a version of ourselves. Maybe that is why the Eras Tour could feel so personal to people who had never met her. They weren’t only watching Taylor remember who she had been. They were remembering too.