INSIDE AN AMERICAN ROYAL WEDDING

A mega-famous pop star and a Super Bowl champion celebrated their love in Midtown Manhattan, announcing both their union and their cultural domination

- Amanda Hess

By all accounts, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are married.

By all accounts, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are married. After a year of rumour, speculation and prediction-market prop-betting over where the couple would celebrate the event, they did it not at Swift’s seaside mansion in Rhode Island, nor at her New York City compound. In the end, they decided to do it at work — inside the arena of sport and entertainment where Swift first performed at the age of 13.

The Swift-Kelce union at Madison Square Garden has been described as an American version of a royal wedding. Having coincided with the 250th anniversary of our breakup with the British Empire, it’s worth asking what that means.

“American royalty” rejects the idea of a hereditary line of figureheads, but it borrows the notion that one figure, through beauty, romance, talent and work, might rule over an adoring crowd. Our version plays out as an immersive simulated experience starring celebrity avatars. Royal weddings may unite bloodlines or merge empires, but they always revise and re-assert a national identity. This one, between the pop star and the football player, is a crossover event that announces a hegemonic cultural power.

Of course, it’s also a private party, a celebration of the love between two human beings. This is an occasion that collapses the distinction between the public and the personal, the exclusive and the ubiquitous. Though staged in the heart of midtown Manhattan, in the spot where three railroad networks converge, the festivities were obscured inside the arena’s fortified walls.