When Griff was eight years old, she was “completely in love with” Fearless, the second album from a precocious young country singer called Taylor Swift. “After school we weren’t really allowed to watch TV,” she remembers. “It was more like, entertain yourself. My version of that was covering Taylor songs at the piano. For hours.”
Some 14 years on, Griff is an artist in her own right, and her childhood idol is the biggest pop superstar on the planet – but she didn’t join the rush to get tickets for Eras at Wembley. Why? Griff had an inkling that she might be invited to open for Taylor when her blockbuster tour finally rolled into London. “I met her at a Kendrick Lamar concert last year, and she kind of mentioned it…” she says. “I had a feeling, so I didn’t get tickets. I took the chance!”
The risk paid off: the singer was asked to join Swift on the bill for night two of her first stint at Wembley this summer, which has seen Travis Kelce make a cameo on stage alongside his girlfriend, Prince George and Princess Charlotte posing for a royal selfie backstage with the star, and Hugh Grant inexplicably snacking on carrots while watching with his fellow celebrity Swifties from the VIP tent. “She’s been very, very generous over the years with supporting my music,” Griff says over a video call, a couple of days before her supporting slot. “It always stuns me a little bit.”
Once she knew for sure it was happening, Griff turned her attention to what to wear for the biggest gig of her career to date. And rather than reaching for, say, one of the voluminous Simone Rocha looks the 23-year-old star is fast becoming synonymous with, she settled on making her dress herself. “[Making] the outfit is adding to my manic-ness,” says Griff, who learned to sew while studying textiles at A-level, and confesses to being a bundle of nerves and excitement ahead of her Wembley performance. “I always do this. I think, ‘Yeah… I can rustle up a dress!’”
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She’s made several of her stage outfits over the years – and created one of the three looks she wore to pick up her Rising Star Award at the Brits in 2021 – but Eras called for something special. Griff ultimately landed on an homage to “But Daddy I Love Him”, a track from Taylor’s latest album that features the lyric, “Running with my dress unbuttoned”. She designed her “mesh-y, translucent-y, deconstructed” gown to reflect just what that might look like on stage. “I really fell in love with The Tortured Poets Department, and more specifically ‘But Daddy I Love Him’. I’ve always been drawn to a big dress shape and deconstructed fashion… I wanted the dress to almost look open, to flow.”
Her stylist, Kamran Rajput, provides emotional support (“I mostly call him from fabric shops, like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing!’”), but Griff is hands-on with her dressmaking. “I’m not very good at delegating. I’m also not organised enough to delegate. I’m sort of like, ‘Shit! I’ve got 45 minutes this morning, let me go down to Goldhawk Road and see what’s there,’” she says. “To me, the bone in my body that likes making songs is the same one that enjoys making clothes. Be it a song or a dress… something might not exist right now, but then in two hours, it could.”
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Last-minute tweaks to her look aside, Griff is concentrating on soaking up the atmosphere in London while Taylor is in town. “This week it has felt like real Swift mania – it’s everywhere. It’s so good.” She played Wembley last year in support of Coldplay, but “there’s just a different community spirit to the Swifties”, she declares. Griff sounds more than ready for her own big moment in front of the fandom: look out for her on stage, dancing in her best (homemade) dress, fearless.
