This weekend, America celebrates 250 years of being free from British rule, so it seems strangely fitting that the anniversary coincides with the crowning of celebrity royalty: Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift. While specific details of their upcoming nuptials are a tightly guarded secret, reports have swirled that the pop superstar and NFL player will marry in New York over the 4th of July weekend. Apparently, around 1,000 of their nearest and dearest will celebrate with them at NYC’s iconic Madison Square Garden.
“Tayvis” are far from the only famous couple to “make it official” recently. In fact, following the weddings of Dua Lipa and Callum Turner, Zendaya and Tom Holland, and Charli XCX and George Daniel, it feels like the celebrity wedding is so back. In one sense, this is a throwback to the pre-social media era, when magazines would clamor to publish the “Exclusive!” pictures of the A-Listers of yore. But at the same time, it’s also a signpost of the current moment, where weddings can be viral #content and, even for “normies,” a personal branding opportunity. In a throwaway culture that makes finding “the one” feel like an impossible task, a fairytale wedding is once again the height of aspiration. And today’s celebrities? They’re practically saving heterosexual dating morale—one chic wedding at a time.
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Charli XCX and George Daniel married in July 2025
When I was growing up in the UK, there was a micro-controversy that now feels hilariously of-the-time. In 2000, when a B-List-famous TV presenter named Andrea Turner got married, she was accused of incorporating an advert for Cadbury’s chocolate into her wedding pictures. The snaps were already being published by OK! Magazine, so the couple was branded “greedy” for presumably cashing in twice. Soon, the story ended up on the front pages of a tabloid newspaper with the headline “Sickener,” prompting an official denial from the chocolate brand. Oh, the drama.
This furor seems particularly quaint today, when it’s totally normal for celebrities and influencers to integrate brand promo into (formerly) personal moments. In the social media era, reputation management and self-branding are no longer the preserve of celebrities—and a wedding has become a very public way for couples to do both. For A-List stars, who have the budget, connections and followers to create a bigger spectacle, weddings come with added branding potential. As the journalist Moya Lothian McLean succinctly described it on her podcast, If I Speak: “It’s like the arch digest tour, but of your relationship.”
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Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift are rumored to be getting married at Madison Square Garden this weekend
This might be why, out of the celebrity couples who have tied the knot recently, there is a notable synergy between their weddings and their public personas. From the start of Swift’s whirlwind romance with Kelce, they both seem to have enjoyed coordinating very public moments around their relationship and careers. (These include Swift welcoming him on stage at the Eras tour as a surprise guest, running onto the football field after he won the 2024 Super Bowl, and announcing her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, on his podcast.) Writing about the camera-seeking choreography of “Tayvis” in 2023, Anne Helen Petersen noted that Swift “understands what audiences want most is a celebrity relationship that plays out like it’s high school.” And sure enough, when the couple announced their engagement via an (immaculately-presented) Instagram post in 2025, she included her song “So High School,” alongside the caption: “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.”
On the other hand, fellow 2026 bride Dua Lipa brands herself as less of a showgirl, and more of a taste maker. Outside of music, the British star’s main brand identifier is that she’s cultured. The favored fan narrative (and meme) is that she’s always on holiday, with an Instagram grid full of beautiful beaches and sophisticated dinners at restaurants that become hot-spots as soon as she recommends them. In 2022, she launched Service95, a global style and arts platform, which describes itself as “the ultimate cultural concierge.” The platform has a popular book club, alongside a podcast where the pop star interviews authors.
Continuing this theme, there is something almost achingly chic about Dua Lipa and her relationship with Callum Turner—a man with a type of nostalgic handsomeness you only see in black and white pictures from the 1950s. In May, when the couple officially tied the knot at a town hall in west London, the bride wore a custom white Schiaparelli Haute Couture skirt-suit, paying homage to the ivory Yves Saint Laurent smoking jacket and sunhat worn by Bianca Jagger when she married Mick Jagger in 1971. They continued the celebrations with a wedding weekend in Palermo, attended by everyone from Donatella Versace to Troye Sivan and Charli XCX.
And speaking of Charli, last summer the queen of radioactive green threw her own two-part wedding to The 1975 drummer George Daniel. According to her on-screen avatar in The Moment, Charli spends a lot of time ruminating on the pressure of being cool. And her wedding could hardly have looked cooler, from the bride smoking on the street in a white wedding gown (very “Brat summer”) to the multi-day bash in Sicily surrounded by creative collaborators including Robyn, Rachel Sennott, Caroline Polachek, Terrence O’Connor and Benito Skinner.
Out of the celebrity weddings we’ve seen recently, the biggest outlier is Zendaya and Tom Holland, who eloped in secret and only revealed the news months later. On the face of things, this seems like quite a departure, because they regularly appear on the red carpet together and seem happy to talk about each other in interviews. But equally, it’s quite rom-com-coded for a couple who have shared so much of their lives—and starred in six movies together—to tie the knot away from the cameras. It feels reminiscent of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, who eloped to a remote island in 1996 for an intimate candle-lit ceremony.
What’s funny about the fan fervor surrounding celebrity nuptials is that, elsewhere in pop culture, weddings have become a horrifying spectacle. In the third season of Euphoria, Cassie and Nate’s wedding descended into a bloody and gruesome disaster, evoking the “Red Wedding” from Game of Thrones. In The Drama, a 2026 film starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, a couple navigate the lead-up to their big day after Pattinson’s character discovers something shocking about his wife-to-be that totally derails their relationship. (By the end of the wedding, he flees the reception with a black eye and a bloody nose.) Writer Charley Ross argues that these horrifying on-screen weddings ask us to confront our own anxieties, encouraging us to “face up to the fears we have around our own relationships, commitments and dreams of intimacy—and the horror that often looks back at us.”
The collective obsession surrounding celebrity weddings is the other side of this coin. They’ve become these highly-brandable, shareable occasions precisely because, if you speak to anyone who is looking for love right now, it’s hard out there. In a dating culture where it’s apparently not uncommon to be “ghosted” by a long-term boyfriend (yikes) and where some young women are even turning to celibacy, it’s not difficult to see why so many would be enthralled by the story of Dua Lipa Turner and Callum Turner reading the same book when they first met, prompting Turner to quip: “So we’re on the same page.” Swift’s fantasy of “your English teacher and your gym teacher getting married” is a beacon of hope in an algorithm-driven, disposable dating world.
Looking ahead to Swift’s wedding, I’m reminded of when David and Victoria Beckham tied the knot in 1999. The star-studded ceremony featured crowns and thrones, declaring the couple as the new celebrity royalty. With “Tayvis,” there is a similar sense of the worlds of sport and music colliding, once again creating a satisfying spectacle of fame and fairytale romance. It’s still entirely possible that Swift could be staging an elaborate ruse while they elope in secret. But a huge-scale MSG wedding party? That would certainly be on brand for a self-proclaimed “showgirl” who has made herself the most famous woman in the world by giving her fans more and more of what they want.