Taylor Swift has cultivated a global brand that might seem incompatible with the darkness, abjection and monstrosity of gothic fiction. But, beneath the friendship bracelets and sequins, her global Eras Tour makes extensive use of gothic elements to engage her audience and articulate her feminist politics.
Her elaborate set designs, for example, incorporate subjects common to gothic art and use contrasting light and shadow and exaggerated perspectives to depict the sublime and the supernatural. Swift’s costumes, meanwhile, transform images of monstrous femininity – the lamia, the witch, the madwoman – into symbols of empowerment.
The potency and global reach of Swift’s creations demonstrate not only the gothic genre’s pervasiveness but its renewed cultural relevance. Her use of the genre has even provoked right-wing accusations that she performs dark magic.
