Taylor Swift | 1989—Big Machine Records, 2014—signed by Swift

Taylor Swift

1989. Big Machine Records, 2014

Two 12" vinyl records, white sleeves, original Polaroid-style sleeve, signed in black sharpie ("Taylor") with Swift's signature heart at lower-right corner; minor bumping to corner, small area of adhesive tape residue.

The 2014 album that cemented Taylor Swift’s bold shift to pop superstardom, signed by the artist herself.

Taylor Swift’s cultural impact cannot be overstated. With 14 Grammy awards, including three for the present album alone, Swift is a powerhouse of pop music and the highest-earning female musician in history. Over the last two years, Swift’s concert extravaganza "The Eras Tour" ran for 149 shows in 51 cities around the globe. It was the highest-grossing tour of all time, surpassing $2 billion with an attendance of over 10 million fans. Her 12 record-shattering studio albums are beloved by audiences worldwide.

1989, Swift’s fifth album, was an essential step in her career. An instant hit, it spent its entire first year in the Billboard Top 10 list and was a tremendous commercial success, selling over a million copies in just its first week. The album formally marked Swift’s transition from country singer-songwriter to pop icon.

Swift is known to have signed two limited pressings of 1989. The present lot is apparently from the first, the "13 Days of Taylor" promotion offered on 10 December 2016, which featured standard black LPs and shared the same barcode as the regular pressing. 250 other signed copies were released as a Cyber Monday promotion in 2018 with pink transparent LPs and a different barcode.

Swift has publicly addressed instances of sexism throughout her career — for instance, the criticism that her songs were mere attacks on her former boyfriends, which she parodied in several songs on 1989. “People would act like it was a weapon I was using,” she told Vogue in 2019. “Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.”

Named after Swift’s birth year, the album symbolized an artistic rebirth of its own.

With upbeat hits like “Blank Space,” “Style,” and “Shake It Off,”1989 takes inspiration from synth-pop music of that decade. The now-iconic cover is similarly eighties-inspired; its central Polaroid photograph of Swift’s sweatshirt cuts off just below her eyes, conveying her desire to be undefined at first glance, as she explained in a 12 November 2014 interview with Time. “I knew that this was the best cover to represent this record, because I wanted there to be an air of mystery," she noted. "I didn’t want people to know the emotional DNA of this album. I didn’t want them to see a smiling picture on the cover and think this was a happy album, or see a sad-looking facial expression and think, oh, this is another breakup record.”

Polaroids became central to the album’s identity. In fact, Swift is arguably responsible for the resurgence of the nostalgic technology; the CEO of Polaroid, Scott Hardy, once said that the album cover “acts as a proof point that our brand is still cool and relevant to that younger demographic” (Digital Spy, 7 August 2015). CD copies of 1989 came with a packet of 13 Polaroid photos from a set of 65, annotated with lyrics from the album — some of which reference the retro cameras directly:

“You took a Polaroid of us

Then discovered (Then discovered)

The rest of the world was black and white

But we were in screaming color”

— Taylor Swift, “Out of the Woods”

In her quest to reclaim her catalog — amid an ownership dispute with her former record label over the masters of her first six albums — Swift re-recorded four of her albums, adding additional never-before-heard tracks “from the vault.” To show support, Swifties opted to listen to only Taylor’s Version albums, and finding original versions — like the present album — became difficult.

But in May 2025, Swift announced that she had successfully negotiated the purchase of her masters, reopening the vault for pre-Taylor’s Version listening. It was the end of an era for the re-recordings: 1989 (Taylor’s Version) was the last of Swift’s re-recorded albums, released in 2023. Swift reclaimed the original 1989, and her devoted fans followed suit.

The present lot represents not only the initial shift in Swift’s career in 2014, but the celebratory embrace of her newfound ownership of the album over 10 years later.