Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty Images (Jason Miller, Mike Lawrence)
The mere concept of the Tayvis wedding taking place at Madison Square Garden has become a war of taste: To do this is apparently tacky (like basically every summer wedding), attention seeking (she’s the most famous person in the world), and inconvenient (oh, because all of you live in Manhattan …?). It’s an idea that feels so allegedly bad that surely it can’t be true, right? Maybe this is a decoy, but unless we see a blurry paparazzi photo of them stepping out of an Escalade for a 12-person ceremony at Via Carota, we have to go with the facts we have, which are very few. What else could she do? Her geographic locations for the wedding are limited: Is she really going to fly 1,000 people to a private island, let alone cities with sentimental value like Cleveland (for Kelce) or somewhere in Pennsylvania (for her)? She lives in New York. She hangs out in New York. She eats at New York restaurants. Sure, this could be a perfect opportunity for someone with unlimited wealth to rent an Italian villa. Or buy out an entire state, like, say, Rhode Island. But MSG makes sense.
It all boils down to security for herself and her guests, both in a literal matter of safety sense and from active scrutiny during the proceedings itself. The upside to having her wedding in a bunker is that maybe the whole internet won’t be aflame about her dress choice, for instance, until at least a few days after. There is probably some part of the couple that would, say, enjoy seeing sunlight outside on their wedding day, but Swift’s endless resources have not protected her from public scrutiny. She got engaged in private, and one time she showed up in Bushwick and it was pretty normal, but this is an event of greater scale and ambition. With drones zooming around her Rhode Island home, a big backyard tent feels, well, kind of silly. Though she has spoken about how her relationship with Kelce has made her more comfortable going out in public, an event of this magnitude requires some degree of caution. I’d wager that there are two events sitting back of mind as the couple plans the wedding: the thwarted terrorist plot on the European leg of the Eras Tour and the mess of crowds at Jack Antonoff’s wedding in 2023. It may be annoying for everyday New Yorkers to navigate their way around Penn Station and the surrounding area, but those blocks are always annoying to navigate around. Remember when the Knicks were in the playoffs? Besides, random streets get shut down around New York all the time: for street festivals, movie shoots, visits from politicians.
Attempting to accommodate celebrities like Patrick Mahomes, Selena Gomez, and quite possibly Sir Paul McCartney in one place is like trying to direct the Oscars on crack. The Met or David Geffen Hall might be a classier location for the mass of A-listers, but neither feels very Swiftian. MSG also allows them to occlude a formal guest list, retaining some degree of mystery as to who’s actually there. Maybe the Haim sisters will want to go in through the Chase entrance on Seventh Avenue, but we’re probably not going to get pap shots of any guests unless we catch them leaving their home to head there. There’s a kindness to that: By not letting us see 99 percent of who’s in the mix, Swift is sparing us from the indecency of celebrities being forced to chat about her wedding on talk shows for the rest of our lives. What details we have about what Swift may do to the inside of MSG are vague, but people who work for her have been spotted at Rock Lititz, where sets for arena shows are often constructed. Why would Swift need a set for her wedding? Look, she’s probably not building “The Man” office all over again, but having some kind of elevated stage so everyone can see her and whatever special performances take place (Ed Sheeran? Sombr? Sir Paul himself?) is expected.
Above all else, in the aftermath of the Eras Tour and Swift reclaiming her masters, what feels most essential to her from a public-facing perspective is image control. She will let us see the parts of her wedding she wants us to see, and not anything else. The bunkerlike privacy of Madison Square Garden guarantees that she has final say on anything anyone sees: the guests, the cake, the dress, the special performances. Every single wedding in existence is corny — it’s inherent to the form — including these upcoming nuptials. Even the weddings that work overtime to prevent a kind of corniness from slipping in wind up being twice as corny in their own way. And so, too, will the Swift-Kelce royal wedding, whether it’s in a walled-off venue or not.
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