Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are officially married!
A “JUST&T MARRIED” sign shines outside Madison Square Garden” for Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding.
In the end, size didn’t matter.
The weeks of breathless speculation and opining are over.
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are married. And they did it all their way, in massive, celebratory form with celebrity friends (Bradley Cooper, Ed Sheeran, Patrick Mahomes, Selena Gomez and more) in a famous venue and with a “JUST&T MARRIED” message against a pink backdrop alighting the video screens at their chosen venue of Madison Square Garden.
Was a wedding at that hulking fortress in Midtown Manhattan gauche? Or does someone of Swift’s wealth and inherent goodness – she and Kelce dropped $26 million in donations to several charities this week – deserve to have whatever she wants, wherever she wants with however many celebrants she wants?
Did the woman who has spent a career immersed in romance with all of its joys and sorrows really exchange vows in what’s essentially her workplace? Or was this sly messaging, telling the world that taking the conventional step of marriage doesn’t diminish her ambitions to get back to a life spent creating music?
Yes, in the end, Swift got her fairytale wedding, complete with a Christian Dior Haute Couture dress and Christian Louboutin shoes. And she celebrated with more than paper rings by “doing things greater than dating the boy on the football team,” as she memorably – prophetically? – lyricized in 2008’s “Fifteen.”
She found a kindred spirit in Travis Kelce, her human exclamation point, the guy who saved her from “The Fate of Ophelia” and us from another album of tortured poetry.
But Swift has always been an intriguing combination of supremely canny and hopelessly romantic, and she leaned on both of those defining traits to pull off the celebrity wedding of the century, even with some cranky locals grousing about street closures (as if that didn’t happen last month with the New York Knicks in the NBA Finals, or for, say, every festival, parade, movie shoot or presidential visit in the area) and police presence (which the couple reportedly paid a hefty sum, as befits a private event).
By hosting a reported 100 people for a comparably intimate rehearsal dinner July 2 at Infosys Theater at MSG and supersizing everything the next night for a victory lap around an MSG reportedly transformed into a wedding wonderland, Swift sent a clear message: She may gravitate to every spotlight and share her poetic diary entries with her fans, but some things are sacred.
In the weeks leading to what some called “our” royal wedding, media outlets worldwide (guilty as charged) scurried for any whiff of clues with the intensity of Swifties decoding if the number of steps she took walking across a SoHo sidewalk add up to the potential date of her next album release.
Swift was likely sitting somewhere with a catlike grin, watching and hearing the false rumors, the silly speculation of everything from guests to attire to performers, the criticisms that she flaunted her wealth as a self-made billionaire twice over during tough economic times (hi, Jeff Bezos).
And hopefully, she cackled, assured with the knowledge that no one outmasters the “Mastermind.”
This was her wedding, her way. As it should be.
