Best wishes to the happy cultural phenomenon!
Wake up, babe, new wedding of the century just dropped.
That’s not an exaggeration. The engagement of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, which Swift announced via Instagram Tuesday, warranted breaking news alerts from outlets ranging from the to ESPN, and a live cutaway by Fox News from a presidential Cabinet meeting — after which, reporters promptly asked the president to comment on the engagement.
Swift’s post — which included photos of the two cuddling in a cottagecore flower garden, like something out of a Taylor Swift song — racked up over 5 million likes within 40 minutes of dropping. From New York to Mexico City, fans were literally shouting in the street.
In a world of divided attention spans and too many celebrities, it really, really doesn’t get bigger than this. Between the two of them, the newly engaged Swift and Kelce take up huge amounts of room in our collective cultural headspace — and now the two are forming an empire. With their marriage, the pair will far surpass just about any other couple you could think of in terms of their cultural reach, influence, and power.
In other words, as one X user put it, “this is gonna be bigger than prince harry and megan markle’s wedding holy shit.”
While they’re both reaping the ongoing benefits of their relationship, however, the cultural fallout could pose very different risks for them both. While Kelce’s brand is tied primarily to his roles as an athlete and podcaster, Swift’s is inevitably tied to who she’s dating and how that surfaces in her music. Could that change? And what will marriage do to her music, her fandom, and to her career?Have we ever had a moment like this?
America’s biggest celebrity couples are the closest thing we have to royalty, and there’s arguably no couple in recent memory that’s bigger than Taylor and Travis. She’s not only the biggest pop star of this generation, she’s “inevitable,” even when the topic isn’t about music, but jet fuel or social justice, cats or Cats. Meanwhile, he’s one of the best tight ends in NFL history, a player who gets attention and respect from sports fans who might rarely think about pop divas. The two of them have driven the cultural conversation to new levels of overexposure and then, somehow, remained overexposed without losing any of their combined caché. They don’t just shape what’s left of the monoculture — they are the only remaining monoculture.
That’s an unexpected bonus now that the time has come to obsess over the wedding. The average couple’s need for privacy means we’re usually left to guess at many of the details. In 2008, for example, Beyonce and Jay Z married in secret, without ever announcing their engagement. While Kanye West proposed to Kim Kardashian on camera in 2013, that event was entirely filtered through the production of Keeping Up With the Kardashians.
Not so with Taylor and Travis. The entirety of the couple’s two-year relationship, save for the very beginning, has played out in the public eye, and unlike many other famous couples, they’ve seemed to easily embrace both the public performance and the relative transparency that have kept their fans on the hook.
