Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s Madison Square Garden nuptials will be a production on the scale of her huge “Eras tour,” multiple sources tell Page Six.
The event has been under the direction of Los Angeles-based celebrity wedding planner Mark Seed, who has been working on it “for months,” ahead of the July 3 big day, according to insiders.
“He can build something spectacular out of nothing,” one source told Page Six.
And with a whole 20,000 seat arena to potentially fill, he certainly has his work cut out for him. Sources say it will likely take several days to build out the venue for a full-scale wedding and multiple days afterward to take it down again. Tellingly, MSG has no events on its calendar from June 29 through July 6.
If Swift and Kelce are going the whole hog, major remodeling at the venue will be needed.
“It would be an Eras-tour level production,” Darren Olarsch, founder of On The Move Entertainment, a production company based in NoMad, told Page Six.
“It’s doable, but it is like planning a concert. What might be a $300,000 wedding somewhere else, inside the Garden would be $3 million,” he added.
Explaining what it would look like, Olarsch added: “The production team would have to build out overhead structures”— using decorative elements like draping — “to bring down the scale,” from the 150 -foot height ceiling, so it feels more “romantic, close and intimate.”
“They would literally build the wedding venue on the floor. Your own mini stage, dance floor and surrounding tables that are all right there; a venue within a venue.”
And to conceal the four huge tiers of seating, Olarsch says the windowless arena means Swift and Kelce can use lighting to their advantage, as they are completely in control.
“You black out the seats, no one would ever see them. You light the areas you want people to see,” he said.
Regarding the actual look of the wedding and its décor, planners think Swift will want to lean into her trademark style, noting there is likely to be many floral elements, as at the pair’s engagement.
“Given Taylor’s style, she would lean heavily into the romantic, storybook aesthetic that has appeared throughout her eras like, ‘Love Story,’ ‘Folklore,’ ‘Evermore.’
“Some design elements would likely include an enchanted garden, soft candlelight, draped ceilings and fabric with vintage touches,” New York-based celebrity wedding planner Lauren Zizza told Page Six.
A second wedding planner also feels it likely there will be multiple spaces created within the arena for the different parts of the wedding.
“People forget you have a ceremony, a cocktail hour, a dinner dance and an afterparty – you need four distinct spaces.
“I imagine the main floor of the arena would be the place for the dinner and dancing — Similarly to fashion shows where they take over a venue, or the Met Gala. You look at the space and then decide what you want to put it in, rather than letting the space dictate what it is,” the source said.
Within the venue itself there are several options the “Karma” singer and her Kansas City Chiefs fiancé can use, which could allow them to host a more intimate ceremony followed by a larger-scale celebration in the main arena.
“I think the [Infosys] Theater is where the ceremony [would] be,” a source in the wedding industry explained, referring to the venue’s 5,000 capacity Roman-theatre style seated underground venue.
“The ceremony is most important. It could also be in one of the lounges or a restaurant space they close down and rejigger to make it more intimate,” the source added.
No matter which part of the venue is used, Seed and his planning assistants will have to ensure every aspect is union approved, per MSG policy.
“Whoever is working there would have to be complaint with the unions — union electricians, union riggers, the people loading the gear, setting up any stage, all the support is unions,” a music industry insider told Page Six, also noting the cost to insure the venue for the event and workers will be astronomical.
When it comes to arrivals, huge stars like Swift and Kelce and their sure-to-be star-studded wedding guests can’t exactly come via subway or pull up at the front of the venue amid the street hawkers, halal carts and weirdos who hang around Penn Station.
It’s more likely, Swift and Kelce will arrive in blacked-out SUVs at an unmarked entrance off 7thave and 33rd street. There, a secured garage-door on the street level leads underground through a special passageway which goes 5-stories down, then straight up into the building.
As for catering, sources expect Swift, who is often a champion of small businesses and fiercely loyal to her second home, Nashville, is most likely to bring in caterers from that town.
“She’s very generous with making people’s lives [by booking them] rather than using the usual suspects,” said the wedding planner source.
If Seed — so discreet his is ” renowned for never, ever talking about his clients” — is indeed transforming MSG for Swift and Kelce’s mega-wedding, it’s certainly not his first rodeo.
He previously organized Jennifer Lawrence’s wedding to Cooke Maroney in 2019, staging the bash at the historic Belcourt of Newport, a lavish 1894 mansion inspired by Versailles in France.
He also constructed a greenhouse on the lawn of the Los Angeles home of actress-producer Sam Ressler’s parents for her wedding to Jason Borg in April 2022.
If Swift and Kelce do tie the knot at MSG, they won’t be the first to do so.
Funk legend Sly Stone famously hosted a theatrical wedding in 1974 to model Kathy Silva with guests required to wear gold, according to Rolling Stone.
The over-the-top affair turned into publicity stunt for the singer’s the Family Stone backing band, who played a sold-out concert for 21,000 fans.
Some of the soul superstar’s outlandish demands for the ceremony included 100 white doves be released into the arena when the couple said “I do.” However, the idea didn’t fly with MSG, who rejected the request outright.
Then in 1982 a mass wedding took place, when 2,075 couples were united at the same time, organized by the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, a religious offshoot founded in South Korea by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.
MSG also has a lot of nostalgia for Swift. She’s performed there eight times throughout her career, beginning with 2009’s “Fearless” tour.
As well as their families, highly rumored to be filling out the guest list are Swift’s closest pals, including Selena Gomez, Gigi Hadid, the Haim sisters and Ed Sheeran, as well as Zoe Kravitz, although its unknown if her fiancé Harry Styles — one of Swift’s exes — will be in the building.
Meanwhile, Page Six recently confirmed Miles Teller and his wife, Keleigh Sperry, were left off the list after a falling out and Swift’s former BFF, Blake Lively, is also persona non grata, as we previously reported.
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