Museum with Taylor Swift’s memorabilia and clothing becomes a must-see for fans in London

“Love Disappointed,” painted in 1821 by the Irish artist Francis Danby, is a scene of adolescent melancholy, its visual codes as legible as they were then. A young woman sits by a river, tearful and desolate, her head in her hands, her white dress pooling around her legs. In the water, pages of a torn letter float among the lily pads. At her side are the trappings of femininity: a straw hat, a bright red shawl, and a miniature portrait of the man who hurt her.

The work is in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, in a red-walled gallery filled with Georgian and Victorian paintings. Recently, Danby’s weeping beauty has a new neighbor: a cream, ruched Zimmerman dress worn by Taylor Swift in the music video for “Willow,” from her 2020 album “Evermore.”

The dress is one of more than a dozen items from Swift’s personal archive featured in installations across several galleries at the V&A. Danby’s painting is “totally her style,” curator Kate Bailey said of Swift, pointing to the lovestruck girl and her array of trinkets — “the dress, the scarf.”

It was barely noon on a muggy July day, and yet Bailey, a senior curator in the V&A’s department of theatre and performance, had already logged more than 8,000 steps on her iPhone pedometer as she jogged around the museum overseeing the Taylor Swift installation. The exhibition, “Taylor Swift: Songbook Trail,” will be open to the public until Sept. 8.

“Whose idea was it to make a tour of the whole museum?” Bailey asked as he arrived, breathless and cheerful, in the sumptuous Norfolk House Music Room. The V&A acquired the room in 1938, when Norfolk House was demolished, and reassembled it in its entirety, panel by panel, in 2000.

Swift’s “Speak Now” blared from the speakers, and her iridescent tulle dress, worn on the album’s back cover, sat on a mannequin in a display case in the center of the room, like a ballerina in a giant music box.

Elsewhere, Bailey had placed the red, puff-sleeved Tadashi Shoji gown that Swift wore in the “I Bet You Think About Me” video next to a colossal velvet canopy bed, commissioned by the Earl of Melville in the 1700s to convey status and political success. Swift’s Reputation Tour outfits, including snake-embellished Gucci boots, were in a spot normally occupied by “The Three Graces,” Antonio Canova’s white marble sculpture depicting the three daughters of Zeus entwined in a sisterly embrace.

“Old masters, new masters,” Bailey said as installers positioned a Zuhair Murad sequined leotard from Swift’s “1989” tour next to Raphael’s Cartoons, commissioned in 1515 by Pope Leo X for the Sistine Chapel.

The works, some of the most precious examples of Renaissance art, belong to the king, “so obviously everything that’s done has to be very respectful,” Bailey explained as she adjusted a layer of protective fabric to protect Swift’s sequined, flesh-toned look.

“I’m feeling quite positive, though, because William and the family went on tour,” she said. (The prince was filmed with his children at an Eras Tour performance in June, dancing to “Shake It Off.”)

The “script” format of the exhibit, Bailey said, is a nod to the singer’s famous “Easter eggs,” her habit of sprinkling subtle messages and clues into her looks and lyrics. The number of exhibits showcasing her dresses and outfits is 13, Swift’s lucky number. None of this will go unnoticed by Swift fans who embrace an approach to visual analysis that veers between the forensic and the fanciful, or even the playfully paranoid.

The idea for a Swift-themed exhibition came to Bailey in April, shortly after the Eras Tour began. The tour was already boosting national economies, becoming the first to gross $1 billion.

“We knew we had to get creative,” Bailey said, noting that the museum had to reuse several existing display cases because of the rush. “It was the fastest-moving project I’ve ever worked on.”

Now, as she wanders the galleries, she sees the V&A collection through Swift’s prism, noticing the abundance of cats among the objects, the appearance of various snakes or guitars.

By pitting Swiftian artifacts against historical treasures, Bailey’s curation makes the project’s intentions explicit: to bring new blood among the old. The V&A’s curatorial team hopes that as they admire the cardigan from “Folklore” — displayed in an elegant gallery devoted to landscapes — a new audience might glance at a nearby Constable or Turner and feel some, if not an equal, level of excitement.

Taylor Swift’s concert marks a moment of explicit celebrity engagement for the museum. Other current exhibitions include model Naomi Campbell and Elton John’s photography collection. The museum, like many others, is looking for exhibits that will appeal to the public. Visitor numbers, while growing, are still well below pre-pandemic attendance figures. Swift’s exhibition is free, and is aimed at attracting teens and twentysomethings who will attend the next leg of her Eras tour in London in August.

Back downstairs, Swift’s Victorian-style faux-leather skirt and blouse, worn in the video for “Fortnight” from “The Tortured Poets Department,” sat next to Foggini’s marble of Samson slaying a Philistine with the jawbone of a donkey.

Not everyone will “get” the exhibition, Bailey acknowledged. Some of its juxtapositions reference the criticism Swift has faced throughout her career. At one of the first stops on the tour, the Versace shirt, cropped wig and fake beard Swift wore in the video for “I’m the Man” — in which she challenges sexist double standards in the creative field — are placed in front of mosaic portraits of some of the great men of art from the 1860s and ’70s: Hans Holbein, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir Christopher Wren. The figures glow, looking down imposingly from on high.

Overall, Swift may be something of a curator’s dream, given her fascination with objects. She displays her collecting instinct, and her story — and various reinventions — are inextricably linked to a series of artifacts.

“There’s a really great way she relates to things, whether it’s mirrors or snakes or cardigans or other objects,” Bailey said. Her use of objects and emblems as a means of communication — part of her arsenal of weapons in disputes or reputation battles — is well suited to a space dedicated to visual codes made tangible, the treasured possessions of the great and powerful.

Taylor Swift must be refreshing, Bailey reflected, for an audience so often preoccupied with the digital. “She puts them in a place that feels real,” she said.