I swerved a massive wedding - Taylor Swift may live to regret hers

The UK may not have braced itself for this week’s heatwave, but the rest of the world appears to be bracing itself for what could become the biggest celebrity wedding in modern history.

A reported one thousand guests. Three days of celebrations. Rumours of Madison Square Garden. I am, of course, talking about Taylor Swift’s wedding to Travis Kelce. And if the rumour mill is to be believed, she isn’t planning a wedding – she’s planning a cultural event.

As a brown woman, I know a thing or two about big, fat weddings. We don’t do anything understated. We don’t even know what that means. Everyone gets an invite: that estranged uncle you haven’t spoken to in a decade, the neighbours, Dad’s work colleague from 1998, your mum’s best friend’s daughter who you’ve met exactly once – even the groom’s third cousin, who now lives in Sheffield but still turns up because “family is family”. If you’ve ever crossed paths, you’re probably on the guest list.

Asian weddings are an art form. It’s about honouring relatives, returning invitations, repaying favours, avoiding offence and making sure nobody spends the next decade asking: “So… why weren’t we invited?”

When I was a kid, I loved them. There was endless food, cousins everywhere and a whole week of celebrations that felt like an adventure. It was like being on family holiday somewhere sunny like Marbella, even if you were actually in a sports hall in Stepney. We’d run riot, disappear for hours and get up to no good while the adults worried about family politics. There was an innocence to it all.

Then I got older – and suddenly, the weddings felt less magical and more political. There were aunties sizing you up as potential marriage material, distant relatives asking deeply personal questions they had no business asking, family feuds simmering beneath the surface and endless post-mortems about who hadn’t been invited and why. Leave off the groom’s second cousin twice removed’s neighbour’s sister-in-law and you’d accidentally trigger an international incident.

But, the bigger the weddings became, the less intimate they felt. Somewhere along the way, they stopped being celebrations and started becoming popularity contests.

When I got married, I did what we call a “white people wedding”: around 120 guests, made up of immediate family, cousins and one friend. By Asian standards, it was microscopic. I hated my wedding day, but for completely different reasons. The guest list wasn’t one of them. I knew every single person in the room.

But, I’ve spoken to plenty of brides and grooms who’ve accepted that – especially when Mum and Dad are paying – the wedding isn’t entirely theirs anymore. Family politics take over. My sister is engaged and my mum has already started lobbying for people she thinks should be invited. Some things never change.

I’m not suggesting Taylor Swift’s wedding will resemble the parade of gigantic Asian weddings I grew up attending, but it does raise an interesting question: at what point does a wedding stop being an intimate celebration between two people and start becoming a spectacle? And, who actually has a thousand close friends? Literally nobody.

When the Ambanis – the family of India’s richest man – married off their youngest son, Anant, to Radhika Merchant in 2024, they threw not just days, but months of celebrations, reportedly costing an eye-watering $600m. That wedding budget got you a chartered Mediterranean cruise, private performances by Rihanna and Justin Bieber and a guest list filled with the likes of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and the Kardashians, all rubbing shoulders.

I thought it was grotesque. In a country with extreme levels of wealth inequality, it felt like obscene excess. And yet, I couldn’t stop looking.

My group chats were popping off. I was sending photos of the Kardashians’ questionable attempts at Asian fashion to my sister and my agent so we could judge and dissect. We doomscrolled, analysed the guest list, marvelled at the sheer greed and indulgence, debated every outfit and devoured every TikTok. I condemned the excess, while consuming every last gaudy, glittering detail of it.

That’s the thing about celebrity weddings – they don’t just “happen”, they become spectator sports. We rail against wealth inequality one minute and spend the next zooming in on someone’s diamond necklace. They turn us into hypocrites.

If Taylor Swift gets married next week, I care about three things: the guest list, the dress and the logistics. Apparently, every invitation reportedly carries the name of the guest – with no plus-ones allowed – so any leak can be traced back directly to them. If true, that’s less wedding planning and more CIA-level ops.

Then, there’s the venue. If Madison Square Garden really is the location, that’s fascinating in itself. One of the world’s most iconic concert venues becoming a wedding venue blurs the lines between performance, branding, legacy and marriage. It feels less like a private ceremony and more like another stop on the Eras Tour.

Every gigantic wedding comes with an implicit gamble: the bigger the spectacle, the bigger the receipts if the marriage fails. Most of us know someone who spent 50K on a wedding, only for the marriage to end a few years down the line. This is, of course, not to say this will happen to Swift and Kelce, but it is a risk every bride and groom take.

Celebrity weddings raise the stakes, because the memories don’t stay inside a family album – they become part of popular culture. For better, or for worse.