🎙️New on the Back Row podcast: Love Story seems like a lock for Emmy nominations, which drop Wednesday. I invited JFK Jr.’s biographers RoseMarie Terenzio (his former assistant at George magazine) and Liz McNeil (a longtime correspondent for People) to come back on the pod to revisit the phenom and talk about what the second half of the series got right and wrong. Check out the free first half in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.
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Loose Threads
Following the Charvet acquisition, Chanel’s president of fashion said at the couture show Chanel men’s is not forthcoming: “We are not dressing men. We are not in hospitality; we are not opening Chanel restaurants. We are not trying to compete with Vuitton. We are not listed; we don’t have the pressure to do everything. Everything we do is about fashion for women.”
Emma Corrin wore the feathered jacket with talon nipples to Schiaparelli’s couture show and the neck part is so stiff and fitted I’m wondering if she could turn her head.
Also at Schiaparelli, Model Lucia Richardson wore a skintight black latex crop top and leggings with “tentacles” sticking out all over (curly talons). She told Vogue it took 20 minutes to put it on. (“It was a process.”) Vogue has footage of someone spraying her pants, seemingly to buff them. Like a car.
Glitz Paris reports that LVMH execs attended Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding.
Which brings us to today’s big story…
23 Thoughts on Taylor Swift's Hyper-Indulgent, Inescapable Wedding
Taylor Swift married Travis Kelce in Madison Square Garden amidst 1,000 guests and more rumors than the dollar amount of her net worth. These included how attendees “spotted a miniature castle built for Taylor’s cats, although it’s unclear whether the feline trio attended.” As far as relics of late-stage capitalism go, it’s hard to do better than cats behaving like those billionaires who build mansions that they might never occupy.
Watching the wedding unfold on social media was a great distraction from the usual horrors in the news. Though not a Swiftie, I thoroughly enjoyed scrolling through the updates on Instagram between drinking margaritas and watching fireworks. Was it ostentatious, over-the-top, and totally strange? Yes. Has tacky triumphed once more? Undoubtedly. Did it seem like the wedding of a star so massive she never hears "no" from the people around her who make millions of dollars off of her? Affirmative. Does it present a new frontier for weddings as public spectacle and monetizable content? More on that ahead in my thought dump on the whole affair.
1. It just has to be a poofy princess dress. Dior's Jonathan Anderson designed custom haute couture wedding ceremony looks for both Taylor and Travis, aka the truncated AT&T logo. We don't know much about the design (people are speculating the finale look in this week's couture show provides clues, but I don't think so). But Taylor's clothes always look less like any particular brand than Things Taylor Swift Likes. Dior surely fulfilled her request for personalized details, like embroidering her cats' names into the lining or whatever she may have come up with.
Finale Dior couture dress. This is pretty, but a little meek for a 1,000-person affair at Madison Square garden, maybe? (Courtesy Dior)
1a. Non-zero chance she wore a tiara.
2. Travis is the kind of guy who can’t resist a velvet suit. Even in the city’s godforsaken 100-degree heat. He’s more of a fashion wild card than her: He loves a bold print, a two-toned shoe, a blouse that screams VERSACE from the opposite end zone. I'd guess he wore bold color or all-white.
3. Was Robin Roberts there to announce this thing like it’s the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade? In Saturday’s edition of Good Morning America, Roberts said the wedding “really was intimate” and “like any wedding that you would attend,” because their "friends" and “neighbors” were there.
4. People this rich have neighbors? Or is it more like if you ride a jet ski for 20 minutes you get to the next occupied island?
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5. Good Morning America on-air talent attending implies a strong Disney connection. (Disney owns ABC and streamed her Eras films.)
6. So Taylor has to be filming this to stream on Disney Plus??
7. If so, this presents a new frontier in turning a wedding into monetizable content, for mega-celebrities and influencers alike. And it’s likely bad news for Vogue Weddings. What if all the world's most glamorous nepo-babies and celebrities just defer to airing wedding specials on ABC or the Mel Robbins podcast or wherever mass eyes and ears go in the late 2020s?
8. Lauren Sánchez must be crying into her “woke up sexy as hell again” coffee cup if Taylor Swift was cool enough to, according to a source, have turned down a Vogue Weddings feature.
9. Did Anna Wintour sneak in early the way she does for fashion shows? If so, did she sit there in her seat before anyone else, as though to make a point about starting things on time? And then run out as soon as the ceremony ended? I have no idea if she was invited, but the guest list included so many people that the running joke of the night was, according to Rob Shuter's newsletter, “How do you know Taylor and Travis?” Allegedly, many among the random assemblage of stars, ranging from Wayne Gretzky to Fergie, barely did.
10. This event is better than the Met Gala in so many ways: One, the guest list. You have to love the randomness of Paul Rudd, Zadie Smith, The Chainsmokers, and Conan O'Brien all going to an event where they're gifted Dior bags and play carnival games together. Two, fortunately for all the stars, no one had to have a talking point ready about a piece of art. (Though I could totally see this being the type of thing where people got cold-called to answer T&T trivia, but at least that wasn’t streamed on YouTube to live on the internet forever.)
11. Is this a wedding or a business meeting at Cannes Lions? A pre-Sun Valley summit? Corporate guests included former Disney CEO Bob Iger, AMC Theatres CEO Adam Aron, and UMG chairman Lucian Grainge.
12. I bet the rich and famous who get invited to Michael Rubin’s White Party are talking about him rescheduling the date (so that guests didn’t have to choose between his shindig and Swift’s, as though the choice would not have been obvious) like he’s Neil Armstrong stepping foot on the moon. Not all heroes wear capes, guys.
13. Tom Brady — erstwhile Gucci model who attended both the wedding and the White Party — has real “will go to the opening of an envelope” energy these days.
14. I don't like the design of the T&T emblem but I appreciate the innovation of memorializing love as a logo. Like a family crest that could fly on a flag on a big lawn and also go on towels.
15. The hall of what may very well have been candid, non-Getty photos of them kind of looks like the interior of a cruise ship.
16. The secret garden decor, as revealed in the Daily Mail's massively watermarked leaked photos, actually looks pretty nice?
17. Even so, let us not forget she could have wed in any real garden in the entire world. Or build one in a secluded place with natural daylight and beauty that didn't have to be DIYed in an arena like Ikea furniture.
18. It’s funny how the covers designed to conceal the Madison Square Garden seats didn’t hide the aesthetically dissonant and unappealing arm rests.
19. And I feel like Taylor (or Travis) is allowed to have a 'zilla moment about that — nothing snaps you back to the reality that you're on a basketball court/hockey rink like the arm rests regular people have to use.
20. It’s also funny how some of these stars dressed like they were about to spend their night winning Best Actress Oscars. Jennifer Lopez did look spectacular, though.
21. Reformation should have paid one attendee to wear one of their wedding guest dresses.
22. If you told me two guests ended up wearing the same dress, I never would have pictured this particular one.
23. Honestly, it sounds, based on this writeup about their 20-minute vows that left each of them crying, like they really love each other. And they took the same approach to editing those vows that they did their guest list.
Couture Is Full of Oddities This Season
Fellow fashion journalist Dana Thomas will join me on the Back Row Podcast for couture awards, so subscribe in Apple/Spotify/YouTube so you don’t miss it.
In the meantime, the biggies — Dior, Schiaparelli, Chanel — have already walked in Paris. And they are full of funny details:
Dior showed metallic armadillo bags, embellished pumps that were trailing what looked almost like little ponytails, and dresses with fans stuck onto them, as though the atelier played “pin the fan on the model.”
After an absence of soles at resort, Chanel is making up for lost time/shoes. Matthieu Blazy showed heels made of funny garden things, including peas in a pod, what looks like a cluster of vines, and what I think is a gnome.
Chanel also had a spoken word track of a woman narrating her mundane day. (Undercover did something like this first.)
Daniel Roseberry’s Schiaparelli show, The Abyss, was inspired by a place rich people like to go — the deep ocean. It featured a beige petal-like belly button decoration, ear pieces that looked like
vaginasskin extending from the lobes, and dresses that glowed.
The move toward the odd could in part be explained by the Schiaparelli Effect. Schiaparelli is a favorite brand of VICs and Roseberry has carved out a niche in Paris showing strange, never-dull takes on anatomy and animals. These oddities are also catnip for social media talking heads, free marketing that brands can certainly use while luxury finds itself in a downturn. (Case in point: Zendaya wore the finale look, featuring a sculpted torso piece and beaded glowing skirt, at an event promoting The Odyssey the same day the couture show walked.)
It could also be explained by designers feeling they need to truly wow and dazzle clients and their stylists, who have seen it all by this point, to get them to spend. You might have the heels from Blazy’s debut show, but do you have any shoes that look like a tiny man is holding you up?
The Buzzy Couture Debut from Standing Ground
If you’re tired of the Chanel Vs. Dior convo and want to check out something new — have a scroll through the couture show from Standing Ground. If I were in The Odyssey and had to look Odyssey-ish on a red carpet, I’d tell my stylist to scare up one of the draped gowns.
Speaking of oddities, some of the models wore one white contact. (Photos: Victor Virgile and Estrop, Getty Images)
Irish designer Michael Stewart founded the label in 2022 and won the Savoir-Faire award of the LVMH Prize in 2024. The show featured draped dresses with beadwork that almost looked like stitching from a distance. It closed with a sheer bridal look on Kristen McMenamy made from Irish Carrickmacross lace, the product of 26 artisans, 4,000 hours of work, and nine months of development. Couture at its finest — all craft, no gimmicks.
Amy Odell is the New York Times bestselling author of Gwyneth: The Biography; Anna: The Biography; and the essay collection Tales from the Back Row: An Outsider’s View from Inside the Fashion Industry. Write her at amy (at) amyodell (dot) com. Submit a tip or story request anonymously here.
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