And the Summer’s Gathering MVPs Are….
The rock stars of gathering and what we can learn from them.
What do Taylor Swift, Greta Gerwig and Beyoncé have in common besides creating culture-defining work that has given the entire economy a post-pandemic boost? I’ll give you one guess 🙃. There’s something deeper happening: This summer Taylor, Beyoncé and Greta reminded us, invited us, allowed us to experience the transcendent power of gathering in public with strangers again. And I am so here for it.
7 Things We Can Learn from This Summer’s Mega-Gatherings
It turns out each of these artists is a phenomenal gatherer. In fact, their cultural production is inextricably linked to their gathering mastery. And we are the better for it. In this end-of-summer newsletter, I break down seven things we can learn from these stars on why their gatherings are so sticky.
1) The gathering begins before it begins.
To prepare for Taylor Swift’s Eras concerts, fans spend weeks creating friendship bracelets with plastic beads spelling out inside jokes from her lyrics to trade at the concert. One of my colleagues made 75 (yes, 75!) bracelets to distribute ahead of the L.A. concert. Before making the first batch, she texts her group chat to ask their favorite lyrics. While stringing the bracelets, she re-listens to Taylor’s entire discography, and in so doing remembers where she was during each era. This preparation isn’t separate from the concert, it’s part of the pilgrimage.
For the worldwide Barbie tour, Margot Robbie’s stylist’s use of replicas of real Barbie outfits evoked excitement and nostalgia (and complicated feelings!) as she and co-stars Ryan Gosling and America Ferrera toured city after city. The team’s astute marketing team primed the idea for moviegoers to dress up as their own favorite version of Barbie – which they then did in droves.
2) Dress codes give space for connection and expression.
As I’ve written before in this newsletter, a stellar dress code is interpretable, orients to the purpose of the gathering, and is generative at the event. For Barbie, within the hymnal of pink, there are dozens of Barbies to channel. For the Eras tour, fans choose their favorite "era" of Taylor Swift’s music and life. Think: the hipsterness of her Red album, the whimsicality of Speak Now, the glitter country vibe of Fearless, or the crop tops and skater skirts of 1989. Fans hide "easter eggs" from song lyrics in their outfits, like a paper airplane necklace from the song "Out of the Woods."
This is different from wearing a Grateful Dead t-shirt at a concert. These artists are inspiring their fans to dress from the inside out. For the Beyoncé Renaissance World Tour, fans deck out in head-to-toe silver, platinum, and gemstones within a broad, futuristic dress code my colleague described as "Alien Superstar Cowboy." Dressed in gold net with a gold headband halo, Brittany Packnett Cunningham pays sartorial tribute at Beyoncé’s DC concert: "Gold for the queen and the Ace of ♠️, from one B to another, from the loyalest of the hive who can’t be stopped by a lil thunder & lightning because neither can our Queen."
3) During the concerts, the stars create moments of focus with the entire stadium.
In her song "Energy," Beyoncé has a lyric: Big wave in the room, the crowd gon’ move / Look around everybody on mute. Right after uttering "on mute," everyone on stage freezes for a few seconds and they raise a finger to their lips to signal that it’s time for the whole audience — tens of thousands of people — to go "on mute." Since the very first concert, fans have embraced the "on mute" contest, and months into the tour, it’s become a friendly competition to see which section of the stadium can be the quietest. The moment gives fans social permission to chat with each other, to share a temporary mission, and, for just a few seconds, to see if a hive of 90,000 people can be together in pulsating silence.
4) They’re generous hosts.
Both the Renaissance World Tour and the Eras Tour are all-night affairs. Beyoncé’s concert runs two and a half hours, while Taylor’s show includes more than 40 songs and runs three and a half hours. Again and again, the first thing I hear from folks attending is how deeply and completely committed Taylor and Beyoncé are to the entire performance, and to their guests. Audiences leave feeling like they’ve received a gift. When heavy rain and lightning delayed the start of her show in Washington, D.C., Beyoncé paid the DC Metro to keep all 98 of the area’s transit stations open late so fans could get home safely. She understands that the journey to and from is part of the gathering.
5) These events are moments of public, collective joy and safety — after a global pandemic that denied both.
At sold-out screenings of Barbie, in city after city, moviegoers get to experience what it’s like to cackle and laugh and gasp together in a darkened room, and remember how different and special it is to take in a film as a social experience.
When Swifties jump so hard they create "seismic activity" in Seattle, when being at a Beyoncé concert feels like "dipping your whole body into an ocean of pure creative source alongside 80,000 other people," as a friend recently texted, these concerts are doing something deeper than entertaining: they’re providing moments of collective healing.
After a period of the private and public losses of a global pandemic, where physical danger was other people, these safe, joyful, raucous public moments are rewiring us. These events are giving thousands of people a shared experience of physical release and joy and recovery – collectively. If for three years, we were trained to physiologically lean out when a stranger passed, these concerts are the somatic antidote to social distancing: they’re retraining our civic and social nervous systems to be together in public again.
6) These star hosts aren’t just connecting their fans to themselves, they’re connecting their fans to each other.
If making friendship bracelets is part of the journey to the concerts, trading them at the concerts is the destination. When a colleague arrived at the parking lot of the L.A. Eras concert, she was greeted by little kids with lyrics written all over their arms asking to swap bracelets. And the trading continues through the night, with fans giving their creations to security guards and bartenders and parking lot attendants and other fans. Folks are heading home with traded bracelets up to their elbows. These friendship bracelets are collective mechanisms that give fans social permission and shared context to connect.
Similarly, during the "Mute All" moment at Beyoncé concerts, fans have started to pass out printed instructions for how to mute. The Mute All moment isn’t just a shared moment of focus, it too is giving fans a way to connect with and to each other. During transitional breaks throughout the show, sections of the stadium have been seen coordinating practice rounds. "It was the most fun and nerve-wracking collective group project I've ever been a part of," a friend said.
7) They create a temporary alternative world.
Taylor, Beyoncé, and Greta are not just giving us a shared context for connecting and gathering and meme-ing. Each piece of art is specific, disputable, and has a point of view – about what the world could be like, about the values they’re for and against, about how a group of 90,000 strangers can treat one another with kindness and joy.
In a recent interview, Greta Gerwig described her hope for Barbie to be "an invitation for everyone to be part of the party and let go of the things that aren’t necessarily serving us as either women or men."
After attending Beyoncé’s DC concert, Cunningham reflected, "In the stadium, everyone was free to be themselves, celebrated and loved from the stage to the seats." She closed with a blessing: "May every place we inhabit be that free because we make it so."
Experiencing these temporary alternative worlds makes us question and re-consider and daydream about how else we might live — individually and collectively.
As we leave the stadiums and movie theaters and parking lots, as with the best gatherings, we begin to wonder: if it was possible here, where else might we create anew?
As always,
Priya
ICYMI
Healthier Together with Liz Moody
Earlier this summer, I was a guest on Liz Moody's podcast, Healthier Together, to discuss the secret to finding your people and having more meaningful gatherings. You can listen to it here.
Inspirations
In Fragments
After inheriting his family’s farm in Vermont, which was clouded by memories of alcoholism, trauma, and abuse, Jonathan Harris performed a series of 21 rituals to "heal and transform" the space, which he documented in his 2021 film In Fragments. You can explore the 21 rituals here.
Workplace Mental Health
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s office recently released a 30-page "Framework for Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being," centered around five pillars for health: protection from harm, mattering at work, opportunity for growth, connection, and community, and work-life harmony.
Keith Jarrett
Writer Robert Doerschuk recently republished his 1986 interviews with jazz legend Keith Jarrett on Substack. I grew up listening to Jarrett’s Köln concert album with my mother on repeat. Jarrett was a particular gatherer. As Doerschuk writes, Jarrett "would frequently stop whatever he was playing to scold someone in the audience for daring to cough or otherwise impair the attentiveness he demanded."
