At roughly 7:30 p.m. on Friday, July 3, the words JUST&T MARRIED! appeared on the jumbotrons outside Madison Square Garden. The sign meant that the “T&T” in question—the pop star Taylor Swift and her footballer fiancé Travis Kelce—had just wed. Onlookers outside the venue who’d braved the heat wave for any glimpse of the festivities cheered. A reporter for NBC News was caught speechless upon seeing the message. And I, seeing a photo of the screens on Instagram, thought, Wait, did AT&T sponsor this?
I wasn’t alone in my misunderstanding. A major telecommunications company being involved didn’t seem impossible for nuptials that involved several news outlets setting up numerous livestreams to inspect every piece of equipment that entered the venue. And then there was the whopping number of attendees: Last fall, Swift had said on The Graham Norton Show that she intended to invite “anyone I’ve ever talked to,” and she seemed to follow through on that promise. Her guest list of reportedly more than 1,000 people included enough celebrities to make the Met Gala look like a county fair. (The revelers in the crowd had won at least 14 Oscars, 31 Emmys, and 37 Grammys among them combined.) Many of those who celebrated inside Madison Square Garden flexed their presence the next day with Instagram posts featuring gushy captions about who they got to meet. Others have stayed mum, making their activities at the wedding rather fascinating to imagine: Did Machine Gun Kelly hobnob with Zadie Smith? Did Benson Boone attempt a backflip in front of the noted stunt-enthusiast Tom Cruise?
[Read: Taylor Swift’s fans have been training for this]
The glitzy wedding reception seemed like a stellar opportunity for headline makers to shake hands—which is perhaps an uncharitable read of a party I didn’t attend. (Any accusations of FOMO would be warranted, to be clear.) Yet the couple’s decision to tie the knot inside Madison Square Garden—a choice that elicited negative reactions from fans, critics, and locals in the days leading up to the event—with a guest list composed of tastemakers from several industries made complete sense. This was the only way that Taylor Swift, the brand, could possibly get married. Swift is a business, a “monster on the hill,” as she calls herself in the song “Anti-Hero,” and her livelihood is fueled by her own love stories. That the culmination of one may have resembled a conference is unsurprising, even if said conference took place inside a faux “secret garden” and involved Adam Sandler as the officiant.
Swift technically (and impressively) stayed out of the public eye during her wedding, but she acknowledged the crowd outside of Madison Square Garden with that cheeky “Just married” message; a press release announcing the union popped up at the same time. The collective spectacle captured a tension that Swift has long been charting through her music. She seems to both crave and fear attention, to regard the task of being famous as an honor and a burden. In the 1989 song “I Know Places,” she takes pride in how well she can avoid the “hunters,” but five albums later, she admits on the track “Midnight Rain” that she’d been “chasing that fame.” On her latest record, she writes of a showgirl yearning for a private life with her partner (“We tell the world to leave us the fuck alone, and they do—wow”), while also conceding that she’s “immortal now” and “wouldn’t have it any other way.” No matter how much Swift shrouds her personal life in mystery, she also wants some part of her to be visible—to contribute to her outward-facing mythology. As she put it in the standout Folklore song “Mirrorball,” “I’m still trying everything, to keep you looking at me.”
There was a time when she seemed less enamored with being so known. On the album Red—my favorite in her discography—she wrote, on the song “The Lucky One,” from the perspective of an ingenue admiring an older star who’d found a way to escape the spotlight. Her imagined idol, she sings, “chose the rose garden over Madison Square.” As it turns out, Swift has reached a point in her career and in her fame in which she doesn’t have to decide between banishing onlookers or indulging them. Her wedding proved she could address both needs however she liked.
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