A Celebrity Wedding Planner Breaks Down What It Takes to Pull Off Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s Nuptials
By By Sophie Lee
We all saw that wedding this weekend—or rather, the neon screens outside Madison Square Garden announcing that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce had just tied the knot therein. As close to a royal wedding as the States may ever get, the much-anticipated nuptials on Friday came with crowds gathered around the NYPD perimeter, legions of blacked-out SUVs transporting members of the 1,000-person guest list, an (allegedly) ceiling-high castle constructed indoors, performances from Stevie Nicks and Paul McCartney, officiating by Adam Sandler, and custom couture from Jonathan Anderson’s Dior. Those are just the details we know so far.
The rest have been carefully guarded by wedding planner Mark Seed (an alum of TS besties Emma Stone and Jack Antonoff’s ceremonies) with an array of safeguards including watermarked invitations, QR code tickets, and MSG’s fortress-like construction. The cat (Meredith herself, perhaps) was out of the bag that the event was underway when Swift and Kelce’s closest friends and family began arriving Thursday evening for a 100-person rehearsal dinner catered by Sartiano’s. From then through the end of the holiday weekend, it was a mad dash to collect photos of celebrity arrivals, scour the Internet for first-person testimonials, or glean each-wilder-than-the-last details from covert sources (Today swears there were designer bag raffles?).
To make sense of the deluge, and get a bit more insight into what may have happened inside the Garden, we spoke to the “Queen of Event Planning” herself, Marcy Blum. She’s arranged weddings for everyone from Billy Joel to LeBron James, the Soroses and Rockefellers. Here’s what she had to say about how this ceremony could’ve come to be “so Taylor Swift.”
Picking a venue like Madison Square Garden, what would go into taking over a space like that, or make it attractive?
Well, there’s certainly no security issues. There’s no windows. You don’t have to worry about drones. You’re able to lock up all the entrances. You don’t have to worry about people in trees or helicopters or all sorts of things that we often have to worry about planning things like that.
There’s a report that there were around 1,000 guests in attendance. What would it take to staff an event like that and get things running?
There’s so many different facets. There’s your staff, who’s helping you run it—everybody from hosting to “human arrows” to people showing directions. But then there’s all the entertainment staff, all the catering staff, the wait staff and the bar staff. You have to hire people who know what they’re doing and then let them run their little piece of it. But you obviously spend months and months going through the details.
Afterwards, do you breathe a sigh of relief?
Ninety-nine percent of the time, we breathe a sigh of relief.
How do you approach an event with a client of this caliber? Are there a few things that you know off the top you want to understand about what they want?
You have to figure out: what is the end goal? Obviously, if you’re talking about weddings, they wanna marry the person they’re in love with, but some people are much more focused on the ceremony, other people are focused on the party aspect of it all. What’s most important to them? Often the people who hire us, my company particularly, want something that’s great fun. The idea is to make it feel as personal and intimate as possible, no matter how large the guest list is.
That was something people were posting about after this event, that it still somehow felt intimate despite being in Madison Square Garden with 1,000 people.
I don’t know if it was a sit-down dinner or not. It seemed that it was lots of different stations and wandering, and it’s very important for the principal players to be front and center so that everybody gets at least a minute with them, or gets to watch them. Mark Seed is a very talented individual. I’m sure he broke up the space into lots of different entities so you could wander through. So each space itself—I’m just imagining, because that’s the way we would do it—would be smaller, so it wasn’t just the giant floor at Madison Square Garden.
With Mark, what do you make of his work? Is there something that you always expect from him?
He’s a really, really talented producer. The thing that most of us agree on, those of us who are in this sphere, is it’s all about listening to your clients. The details that I heard from this wedding certainly sounded a gazillion percent different than, let’s say, [his client] Jennifer Lawrence’s wedding or Margaret Qualley and Jack Antonoff. That’s indicative of the fact that it’s not about him, it’s about the clients. I have this conversation all the time with people who say, “Your work is very eclectic,” and I say, “Yeah, because it’s about them, not about me.”
Some of the early details say Taylor and Travis had this garden inside the Garden and a castle construction. It feels so Taylor Swift to me.
It’s almost like the essence of Taylor Swift. I listen to her music, I think she’s really talented. It almost sounds like, Well, this is what people are expecting. Let’s give it to them. It was so Taylor Swift, right? The castle, the whole thing.
Have there ever been any requests that you got as an event planner that you were kind of like, “I don’t know if we’re going to be able to make this work”?
We could always make it work. It’s just a matter of, with rare exceptions, what it’s going to cost and how much commotion it’s going to be. Very early on, I was asked to find someone who could channel certain spirits to perform the ceremony. Or, can you have part of the party in one country and then go get everyone on a charter plane and go to another country? Things like that, which inevitably fell through because most people are not gonna spend that [amount of money] or do that to their guests.
I imagine that that’s part of the fun of the job though, is you just have no idea what people are going to ask.
Exactly right. You never know what happens when the phone rings and that’s what makes it very, very different.
We’ve gotten so few details from this event. They pulled off the privacy element astoundingly with this many people to account for. How would you approach that for a venue like this?
Apparently there was a QR code on the invitation or on the guest list and nobody knew exactly what time or where they were going until the last minute, which are things that you absolutely have to do, and you can’t send all the details in an invitation to a gazillion people because there’s no way that’s not gonna leak.
It depends what you want to keep private. Some of my clients really don’t care if people shoot or post photos of the reception, but they feel much more strongly about the ceremony, for example. Or, [there are] people who don’t want people to know what they’re doing in their private lives, meaning they don’t want people to know who their guests are, who their friends are.
We’ve gotten estimates that this is somewhere between a $20 million to $50 million wedding.
I’m sure it’s at least $20 million, with renting out the space and building all that stuff. Labor is outrageously expensive, especially since it’s not like they had weeks. We have often done tent builds where we have three weeks or more to get in there. They had to have a lot of it pre-done before they trucked it in, and that is extremely difficult.
Are there things that you’ve seen out of this wedding that you now might expect a client to ask for, or that might trickle down into what a number of people are doing in their own nuptials?
This is gonna sound so obnoxious, but my clients, for the most part, are more tastemakers than taste followers. I can imagine that a lot of younger people who are getting married who are paying for themselves, they’re gonna say, “Let’s write 20-minute vows each” because of that, but I don’t know what would otherwise come out of it. We really assiduously avoid Pinterest and things like that because my clients are very, very, adamant about it being personal. Someone might look at Jonathan Anderson now as a wedding dress designer possibility, but certainly not specifics like, “I love the color purple. Let’s get everybody to wear purple.”
As we said, it’s quintessential Taylor. It can’t be done again, right?
And if you did, I mean, that would be really sad. You have no personality or any of your own thoughts. I always say to people, “I’ve already done my wedding twice. I got to do what I want. You do what you want. Let’s figure it out.”
Are there questions that you ask that tease out the personality of what they might be looking for?
I’ve been doing this so long. I find it much more successful in asking people, what parties have you been to where you didn’t like parts of it? Usually that’s the thing that gets people talking rather than what did you like. “I thought it was pink, it was pretty, but like I hated where they had this, the ridiculous playlist, or we couldn’t get a drink.” You make sure that you take note that service is important, or let’s be very specific about the music.
Final question: if you were doing Taylor’s wedding, is there something that you would have loved to have worked on with her?
I always loved the dress shopping. I probably would have gotten a kick about that. She’s tall and beautiful, and she could wear just about anything, so that probably was a fun part. [Jonathan] has such an interesting, quirky taste. I can’t wait to see it. And I’m sure also that she was probably over the moon deliriously happy, so that’s probably gonna be fun to see, her beaming.
I am anxiously awaiting the inevitable Instagram photo drop.
I’m sure it’s going to be a feature film or something. I can’t imagine why else they would lock it down so much.
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This article was originally published by Cultured Magazine.