For thousands of unlucky Swifties who couldn’t land tickets to the Eras tour, just being near their idol was — nearly — enough.

For the past year, in cities all over the world, a routine has played out in millions of bedrooms and hotel rooms.

Makeup is carefully applied. Glitter is mandatory.

Outfits and accessories, chosen long ago, are carefully laid out.

Friendship bracelets are slipped onto wrists, with spares carefully packaged.

And the final touches are made before the look is complete.

To be a Swiftie in the Eras era is to commit, fully, and Sophie Morris has been preparing for months.

The 32-year-old has taken work off for the four-day duration of Taylor Swift's Sydney shows.

Her costume-maker sister spent around 80 hours constructing a rainbow version of the tinsel jacket Taylor wears during her performance of Karma.

And on Friday, the megastar's repertoire streamed from speakers, friends arrived breathless from the heat and cuvée was poured, as they got ready to join thousands of other Swifties at Sydney Olympic Park despite storm warnings.

She calls all this "manifesting" because despite hours of scouring Ticketek the one thing Sophie still needed was an actual ticket.

The Swift effect

Sophie's "fixation", as she calls it, began with the first Eras Tour show on March 17, 2023. Before then, she had been a casual fan, bopping along when her music played on the radio. Suddenly she found herself obsessively scrolling a TikTok awash with snippets from the concert, consuming every morsel she could find.

Taylor Swift was always huge, but now she was inescapable. And the mania was infectious: like a whirlpool, with every Easter egg, secret song reveal, or video of her new boyfriend — NFL player Travis Kelce if you've been under a rock — dancing in the wings, people with a passing interest in the pop star found themselves slowly dragged towards submersion.

When the Australian dates went on sale — after more than three months of Eras hype on TikTok — there was no question. Sophie had to go.

"Since the resale launched, I feel, truthfully, like it's become my full-time job," Sophie says. "I've made jokes that if I put this much energy into finding a boyfriend I'd probably have one."

Four million Australians tried to get Eras tickets when they first went on sale in June last year. Since then, many more have lined up physically and virtually for subsequent releases, desperate for a chance to see "mother" — as Taylor is called in some Gen Z circles — in the flesh.

To an outsider, the need to be there seems primal, the acute heartbreak of missing out spilling out in long social media posts.

But some Swifties who went up against the Ticketek Goliath and lost are taking matters into their own hands. On Friday evening, with resale ticket scams and scalping rife, they flocked to the stadium in search of a miracle.

"I've been of the mindset that if I give up, it won't happen … I just have to go in thinking I will go, and I'll manifest it," Sophie says. "Tickets or no tickets, there's still a huge group of people that all have one passion that have joined together for something."

While some remained hopeful they would find a way inside the security barricades, others just wanted to be there. They didn't need to see Taylor, but they'd hear her, and know that they are at least in the same rough geographical area as their hero. They were with their people. That was enough.

Into the Taylor-gate

As the Eras tour bounced across the US, a funny thing started to happen.

Amid sold-out shows and a fierce resale market, people started turning up, ticketless, to the sprawling car parks surrounding America's stadiums.

That people are tailgating, or "Taylor-gating" as it's come to be known, speaks to her influence. Typically this pastime is reserved for sporting matches — think beers and BBQ to toast a big win or drown a miserable loss. It's historically, certainly, not the purview of girls in glittery cowboy boots and sequin mini-dresses.

It's 6.30pm when we arrive at Sydney's Olympic Park in Homebush, a complex built more than two decades ago to host an event of utmost national significance, and now primed for another one. (For anyone curious, more than 320,000 people have tickets to Taylor's four Sydney shows, while 112,000 were in the stands to cheer on Cathy Freeman's iconic gold medal win in the same stadium at the Sydney 2000 Olympics.)

It's a busy night for Homebush. Besides the Taylor crowd, punk-rockers Blink 182 have a concert in the neighbouring stadium, the contrast between the two acts rich material for a cheeky loudspeaker announcement: If someone's asking you "what's your age, again", Blink 182 is over there.

Besides the cultural melange on show, Taylor-gating looks a little different in Australia. For one, there are no sprawling car parks next to the venues (a subject rather unexpectedly canvassed in recent viral tweets), so fans instead flock to the public spaces and parks that wrap around the stadiums. Eskys full of tinnies and camp BBQs are forbidden, as is any other alcohol thanks to strict no drinking rules.

Instead, there are parents with young daughters sprawled out on picnic mats; couples with camp chairs; and sparkling groups of high-school friends carrying bulging bags of Taylor merch.

Live-streams are loaded on phones to make sure they know when it's about to start. Screams ring out from the stadium and the Taylor-gaters respond in unison. 

"Is she actually on? Is she on? I'm going to cry, I'm a mess," says Keira, 16, one of four friends who had travelled from Sydney's south to be there. They weren't able to get tickets but say it's enough to "hear the echo of her voice" and "breathe the same air" as Taylor. "She's very inspiring, she's one woman and she literally brings this many people," her friend Chelsea, 17, says.

All they can see is a big concrete wall, but thanks to TikTok and impeccably timed stage direction, everyone who's here can visualise exactly what's happening: backup dancers are walking onto the stage, each one manoeuvring a giant lilac and orange fabric flag. When they're in position, they fold them over like closed petals, and when they open, Taylor appears as if by magic.

Inside, just a cruel few metres away, are about 80,000 Swifties who were lucky enough to snag tickets to the first Sydney show. On the pavement outside Accor stadium are the unlucky ones. Though you wouldn't know it.

As Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince transitions into Cruel Summer, the energy is that of a women's rest room on a good night out, magnified as though the bathroom was crammed with hundreds of people. Tears flow freely. Strangers are instantly best friends. Outfits are gushed over. Everyone is beautiful, gorgeous, stunning. There's not a bad vibe to be found.

None of this is surprising if you've visited Swiftie online fan spaces in the lead-up to her arrival. In one Facebook group dedicated to the local leg of the tour, for weeks people have been posting their Eras outfits as if they're one big group of gal pals getting ready for an event together: "Does this look Folklore enough?", "Any plus-sized girlies have any outfit ideas?", "Pic of what I'm wearing. Thoughts?". The hundreds of responses are invariably gushing and supportive.

The same group paused posting for 24 hours "out of respect" for a 16-year-old Swiftie who was killed and her 10-year-old sister who was injured in a car crash on her way to a Melbourne Eras show. A GoFundMe circulated in the group has so far raised more than $80,000 for the family. People made friendship bracelets bearing the 16-year-old's name to wear to the concerts in tribute.

It's this energy that led many Swifties to mill outside a stadium on an unpredictably stormy night for a show they don't have tickets for.

Mikaela, 18, who travelled from Townsville, and her friend Hannah, 22, are going to the Saturday show, but came a day early to soak up the atmosphere and trade friendship bracelets. "Everyone is so lovely and approachable, you can definitely tell the Blink 182 and Taylor crowds apart," Hannah says.

Nurses Michaela, 50, and Lorena, 25, trekked all the way from Brisbane. "We were devastated not to get tickets, but this is just as good, I'm grateful," Michaela says. "I wanted to climb the wall, I said we'd do our best, but I'm satisfied."

The after-dark era

Inside the stadium, the first words of Love Story ring out. Is it Taylor that can be heard singing or the thousands of fans in the stands belting it out? It doesn't matter, outside, the crowd goes wild.

For the entire length of the song, two sisters in Converse sneakers jump up and down, clutching each other's hands and embracing through sobs.

When Taylor sings "he knelt to the ground and pulled out a ring" groups of girls literally drop to their knees.

Those 3.57 minutes were electric and cathartic and joyful and every emotion in between, and if you weren't already on board the Taylor train this would have tipped anyone into Swiftiedom.

The two sisters — Kelsey, 15, and Bianca, 13 — are from Perth and have tickets to the Sunday night show, but tonight they're there with their mum and grandmother "to get the most Taylor experience possible".

"Taylor Swift got me back into music, I fell out of love with it for a bit," Kelsey says. "It's so fun making friendship bracelets, and everyone is so nice and so lovely."

Closer to the front gate, another pair of sisters sit on a torn open rain poncho with their mother. Their wrists are stacked with friendship bracelets, their hair bedazzled, and their smiles beaming — despite their lack of tickets.

"We grew up with Taylor, we love her so much, we even have a calender of her in our room, and every day we're like, 'we will see you one day!'," Maralin, 13, and Evelin, 14, say.

The conversation is interrupted when another teenager walks over to complement the sisters' hair and trade friendship bracelets — a practice born out of lyrics in You're on Your Own, Kid from the Midnights album.

It's now around 9pm and we've entered the Speak Now era, one of Taylor's earlier albums but a later segment of the show.

"I was enchanted to meet you…" plays, the feverish crowd parts, and a woman in her Year 12 formal dress twirls in the centre.

Kirsten, the prom queen, says she's been waiting for this exact moment — and her audience, happy to give her the spotlight, looks on in awe.

A pop contagion

Religiously devoted fandoms are nothing new.

Almost 70 years ago, images of girls with their mouths agape, fists to their cheeks, as Elvis bucked and thrust on stage sent the world into a tailspin.

Then Beatlemania swept the globe, hitting Australia in the '60s when huge crowds camped outside their hotels in Sydney. Just last year, Harry Style's Australian tour sparked a noticeable boom in the feather boa industry.

Those same expressions are everywhere tonight — not in response to a sex symbol in tight pants, but to a singer who made a career writing songs about what it means to be a woman. 

The Eras tour has transcended the insularity of fandoms and given rise to a collective social-media-fuelled FOMO so great that even self-professed non-Swifties are shelling out hundreds of dollars just to be there.

Some Swifties are the first to tell you that it's not that serious, that they don't know how they ended up there, that social media got to them, too.

On Friday, though, what was serious was how much being part of the Eras tour meant to people in the moment, even if they couldn't put into words exactly why this 34-year-old American woman spoke to them so deeply.

It's why people flew across the country to stare at a stadium facade. It's why girls ran to hug their friends when the first notes of their favourite song played. It's why people spent hundreds on their outfits, and even more on plastic beads.

And it's why Sophie spent months trying to get tickets, only to have her wildest dreams realised minutes before Taylor was due to go on.

Half an hour after arriving at Homebush, her hand-drawn sign attracted two women whose friend couldn't make it at the last minute.

Ticket secured, she ran off to the stadium gate, shock still on her face.

"I was in shock the first hour so that part's a blur," she says, after the final fireworks had gone off. "The seats were better than I ever could have imagined, it was absolutely worth the effort."

Credits

Words: Maani Truu

Photographs: Jack Fisher

Editor: Leigh Tonkin