Taylor Swift’s wedding may change how couples think about their big day

By Elisabeth Buchwald, CNN

(CNN) — Madison Square Garden isn’t where most people picture saying “I do.” Throw in arcade games and a raffle, and it gives off even less of a wedding vibe. But that’s exactly the point.

Those and other unexpected details surfacing from Taylor Swift’s and Travis Kelce’s ultra-private yet attention-grabbing celebration reflect a growing wedding trend: designing a day guests will remember how they felt, not what they saw.

Consider this your invitation to the wedding-experience era.

“We’re seeing a desire to take some of the stiffness and formality out of weddings and bring the fun back,” said Akeshi Akinseye, founder of Kesh Events, a global luxury wedding and event planning and design company.

The arcade games and raffle make much more sense in the context of building an experience-forward wedding, she added. “It introduces anticipation. Guests are not just consuming the event — they’re part of it.”

“I can absolutely see couples taking cues from this, but personalizing it to fit their own story,” she said.

From content creation to experience design

To execute an experience-forward wedding, more couples are hiring experience designers, Akinseye said.

Julie Comfort, an experience designer who works with wedding planners, describes her job as executing emotional design, or how a wedding is meant to make guests feel.

That doesn’t necessarily require shelling out even more money.

For instance, a recent wedding Comfort designed with the couple’s love for karaoke in mind featured a few close friends singing along with music for their first dance. As the dance went on, more voices joined in and the music gradually faded, eventually disappearing.

“Couples are realizing they don’t have to go over the top to make an impact, they just have to be more thoughtful, intentional, and generous with how they host people,” she said. “A lot of the experience design techniques we use come from the art and theater world to create anticipation, surprise, magic and drama.”

Comfort said experience design is fairly “niche” in the wedding world, but much more common in other types of events, such as a movie premiere or product launch. But as online fatigue grows, she believes fewer couples are going to seek out content creators, people who focus on capturing weddings for the purpose of posting on social media, and look more for who can help them make an event around “presence and connection.”

Location, location

Where a wedding takes place is the front door into the overall experience, said Akinseye, who planned the wedding of Tobias Harris, a professional basketball player and recent addition to the San Antonio Spurs.

What Swift’s and Kelce’s wedding celebration did so well was force guests (and the world) to collectively wonder how an impersonal venue, where the bride attended a basketball game just weeks before and where she has performed concerts, could transform into a place fit for what has been deemed “America’s Royal Wedding.”

In a since-deleted tweet that multiple outlets reported, one guest wrote that “A small portion of MSG was cordoned off, devoid of any notion that a basketball or hockey game ever shared that space. Somehow magically, someone created an outdoor garden at a lush countryside retreat.”

“They say there were around one thousand attendees, but surprisingly, it all felt intimate and small,” the guest wrote. (While it’s unclear why he deleted the post, there’s widespread speculation that was due to what were said to be ironclad non-disclosure agreements — a nod to the exclusive, private experience Swift and Kelce created.)

“There is something incredibly powerful about anticipation,” Akinseye said. “This wedding could absolutely encourage more couples to look beyond traditional wedding venues and ask, ‘What could this space become?’”

For couples looking to take cues from the Swift-Kelce wedding celebration, Akinseye’s advice is not to replicate anything but rather use it as an opportunity “to understand why certain moments resonated and translate that feeling into something authentic to your own celebration.”

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