The Wedding-Conspiracy Mill That Taylor Swift Built
Are Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce getting married at Madison Square Garden? Will Stevie Nicks be performing? Will the wedding be on July 3, as some reports suggest? Or is that just a red-herring date that Swift gave out to see who would leak it to the media? Is Swift, in fact, planning two weddings—one real, one a decoy? Are Kelce and Swift actually already married—and did they somehow manage to hide the entire event from the public?Since the singer and the Kansas City Chiefs tight end announced their engagement in August of last year, fans and media outlets have produced abundant theories about their eventual wedding. But speculation has been escalating the past couple of months. For a while, many people were convinced that the wedding would be June 13—because Swift famously likes the number 13—but that date came and went without incident. Now the rumored July 3 date is approaching, and the chatter seems to have reached a rolling boil.[Read: The tortured poet of love gets engaged]In Westerly, Rhode Island, where the singer owns a home, the mere appearance of a white tent was apparently enough to summon a swarm of photographers and lookie-loos. The Associated Press interviewed a beleaguered Westerly wedding planner who seemed frankly sick of answering whether every single wedding she worked on was Swift’s. And the gossip rags have been doing what they do best, advancing rumors about all sorts of things, including the invitation status of various celebs, and Kelce’s dad apparently “hard launching” a new girlfriend in the lead-up to the wedding. Meanwhile, The New York Times got an unnamed New York City official on the record claiming that the rumors about a July 3 wedding at Madison Square Garden are true.Some of this is to be expected. Celebrities are basically royalty to Americans, and indeed, excitement about the Swift-Kelce nuptials is at royal-wedding level. Swift is one of the biggest celebrities we have, a culture-shaping personality in addition to an all-time