In defense of Taylor Swift’s bad wedding taste

“The more I read, the more embarrassed I am for everyone involved.”

Secondhand humiliation was the looming theme of a group chat on July 3, as friends and I, like the rest of the world, took in the details that emerged from Taylor Swift’s wedding to Travis Kelce inside Madison Square Garden. There was the couple’s own logo, a personalized T&T that appeared on everything from wedding handkerchiefs to custom furniture, before dramatically showing up on the “JUST&T MARRIED” signs that flashed outside the venue. Nearby, the Empire State Building lit up as Swift’s “something blue.” There were the raffled off luxury gifts that included Cartier watches and a vintage car. Blown-up couple photos draped across the walls.

It’s easy to imagine the superstar going feral as she brainstormed all the ways she could bend the world’s most famous arena to her local prom queen sensibilities. Swift, after all, is a billionaire, and the possibilities for cringe are endless. Plus, people tend to lose their minds when they’re planning the most heteronormative, ordinary, domestic thing anyone can do. How else do you explain inviting 1,000 people to a wedding?

Yet for all the skin-crawling aesthetics, there was something joyful about watching the most famous woman alive so unapologetic in the same corniness that has always accompanied her meteoric fame and throw a giant-ass party. Was it intimate? Wasn’t there, couldn’t tell ya. Is beer-soaked MSG my idea of romance? Yuck. But these are the choices of a woman who has been singing about hypothetical weddings for an entire career, and the stress of whittling down the guest list for a small event was something she already told us she’d be avoiding. (“I’m not gonna do that,” is what Swift told Graham Norton, one of the 1,000 guests eventually invited.) It was as if by drenching her wedding in extreme ridiculousness, Swift was confirming, as Tyler Foggatt wrote in the New Yorker, that she, like her fans, viewed her nuptials as the grand “narrative closure” to years of public heartbreak and pining. That might seem embarrassing to admit for some. But that’s probably one of a billion reasons why you and I aren’t Taylor Swift.

Still, do storybook endings grant unlimited license to committing some of the goofiest wedding details I’ve ever come across, when private islands for the ultra-wealthy are right there? Some of the sneering has been justified; the extravagant details from Swift’s wedding are indeed the consequences of what happens when billionaires exist. Others, mad about the event, blamed Swift for causing power outages in the area. (It “absolutely did not,” a Con Ed spokesperson later confirmed.) But did you really expect anything less? Creating a spectacle out of romance is bread and butter to Swift’s lore, and even for all the tackiness, I can’t help but admire Swift’s dedication to decidedly unhip, unabashed romantic kitsch when everyone’s in an arms race to exercise taste these days.

That’s especially true for the other billionaires of the same set. Take, for instance, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, a try-hard who operates under the assumption that style can be purchased; Mark Zuckerberg palling it around with Kylie Jenner after sitting front row of Prada like that’s not awkward as hell; the AI overlords who think taste can be developed and sold for profit. Sure, Swift’s own proclivities might be steeped in the same luxury. But the context in which Swift’s money appears, at least when it comes to her wedding, is rooted in something different, a quality that can’t be bought or machine-learned: earnestness. It’s the same quality that has been central to both Swift’s art and enormous popularity. How else do you explain a 20-minute vow that leaves a grown man in tears? It certainly wasn’t anywhere in the last headline-making billionaire wedding.

Taylor Swift might be the uncoolest bride on earth, and that’s refreshing. Then again, to be unbothered with externally imposed notions of what a “cool” bride should look like is its own kind of luxury.