“No, you can’t come to the wedding,” Taylor Swift sang on her 2024 track “But Daddy I Love Him.”
It was, perhaps, an early lyrical hint at what was to come.
The pop star and her professional football player fiancé, Travis Kelce, announced their engagement in a joint Instagram post in August 2025. Since then, in interviews, Swift has joked about her extensive invitation list and Kelce has hinted at their musical preferences, but the pair has otherwise been tight-lipped about any forthcoming nuptials.
Though details have begun to emerge about the celebrations — with a 100-person event and a 1,000-person event planned at Madison Square Garden in early July — the couple has not hinted at how they might share their wedding with the public.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was an order of operations for a celebrity wedding reveal. A couple would attempt to evade the prying eyes of paparazzi cameras and then release their official wedding photos in a glossy magazine like People or Vogue. Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, for example, graced the cover of People with an exclusive black-and-white photo from their wedding. In 2007, OK! paid a reported $2 million for photos from the wedding of Eva Longoria, the “Desperate Housewives” star, and the basketball player Tony Parker.
That pattern has changed significantly now that digital and social media have thrust every detail of a celebrity’s life into public view, several wedding industry experts said.
Some celebrities still lean on legacy media interviews, or they might choose to take the reins by using their social media accounts. In some cases, as with the wedding of Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco, posting a smattering of photos might quell the public frenzy for information. Other couples seem to lean in, however, including the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, who chose Venice as the less-than-secret location for their guests. Still, even as leaks abound, other mega-celebrities have managed to keep events tightly sealed, as with Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s intimate apartment wedding.
“It’s no longer always a negotiated exclusive with a staged magazine shoot and a controlled interview,” said Brittny Drye, 41, founder of the wedding publication Love Inc. “Celebrities are sharing on their own platforms. They’re their own media, essentially.”
Many couples opt for a hybrid model, Jill Fritzo, a celebrity publicist, said. When her client Paris Hilton married the venture capitalist Carter Reum on a Bel Air estate in 2021, the event was broadcast on Hilton’s social media channels, covered in Vogue and even chronicled in a docuseries, “Paris in Love.”
“Her audience is so huge in social media, but at the same time, I still wanted the elegance and that gravitas of the old school,” said Fritzo, who is 56 and based in New York City.
There was no shortage of paparazzi photos or social media posts when the singer Dua Lipa wed Callum Turner earlier this summer, first in a ceremony at a beloved town hall building in London and then, later, in a multiday affair in Sicily. Lipa herself posted ample pictures from both on Instagram, but waited to reveal her Chanel wedding dress.
Just days after her wedding to Blanco, Gomez posted several behind-the-scenes photos from the event on Instagram. She also posted plenty of professional images from the weekend, but it was the more imperfect images that stood out. A dump of grainy smartphone photos — the kind a noncelebrity might post after attending a friend’s wedding — made followers feel as though they were there.
“The couple can enjoy every moment knowing that they’re not being followed,” said Mindy Weiss, the Los Angeles-based planner for Gomez and Blanco’s wedding. She quickly added, “Well, I think they’re still being followed, but not for that picture.”
Weiss, 67, said that “realness” resonated strongly with Gomez’s fans and also “takes that pressure off” in the race among paparazzi to capture the first photo of an A-list wedding.
Those photos are also, in a way, a gift to fans.
“I feel like this is almost the best of both worlds, because it satisfies the public’s immediate curiosity,” Drye, the wedding publication founder, said. “Everyone wants to know: ‘What did you look like?’ And ‘what designer did you wear?’ but the couple is still being able to control what images are being shared and what story is told.”
There are plenty of other ways celebrity couples can reveal their weddings, too. In 2022, Jennifer Lopez shared her and Ben Affleck’s midnight wedding in Las Vegas in a newsletter sent to fans, before a larger event held in Georgia that was mostly kept private. Jay-Z and Beyoncé showed some of the first glimpses of their 2008 wedding six years later, playing footage onscreen during their “On the Run” tour.
Marcy Blum, 72, a wedding planner in New York whose clients have included LeBron James and Billy Joel, said that keeping a celebrity wedding entirely under wraps is a difficult task, often requiring NDAs, tight circles and checking of guests’ cellphones. (Even with extra measures, details sometimes leak.)
Weiss, who planned Gomez and Blanco’s wedding, added that guests occasionally brought two phones in an attempt to circumvent the tech rules and that she and her team were often on high alert.
Meghan Ely, a wedding publicist who lives in Richmond, Va., said that Zendaya and Tom Holland’s wedding — which the couple confirmed only months later with few details — might signal a cultural shift.
“If you don’t want the attention and you have the right team, it can be done this way,” Ely, 45, said.
For Swift and Kelce, keeping details close to the chest was in keeping with how they had shared other news, including their announcement of their engagement on Instagram after the fact.
“I do think that there will be a wedding reveal for her,” Drye said, “but I think it’s going to happen entirely on her own timeline, on her own platform.”
