A desperate attempt to find any New Zealand connection to the Taylor Swift wedding

They may not have got married here, but that doesn’t mean Aotearoa wasn’t the unofficial guest of honour at Taylor Swift’s wedding.

Crazy to think that it was less than a year ago that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce announced their engagement on Instagram and every single New Zealand brand and/or prime minister had a deeply uncool meltdown online. From the back of his prime ministerial vehicle, Christopher Luxon frantically invited the pair to get married and enjoy their honeymoon in New Zealand, suggesting they might like to spend time with thousands of our mucus-secreting glow worms in a dark cave, or celebrate their burgeoning love by quite literally jumping off a cliff.

Luxon was far from the only New Zealander to lose many marbles over the big news. Palmerston North City Council quickly assembled a wedding pitch (“complete with a custom sign made just for you at Blueprint Makerspace”) and many other accounts followed suit. Pure New Zealand launched a petition to get the pair married here (“New Zealand’s vineyards are the perfect toast to Forever & Always”), Air New Zealand said “you’d be Enchanted to walk down our aisle” and even Paddons Paddock reckoned they’d be perfect for afters.

As we know now, none of that happened. Despite Luxon swearing via “one of my best friends in America who is actually in business with Travis” that the Chiefs star “loved the offer” to get married in New Zealand, the pair were rudely wed over the weekend at Madison Square Garden in New York City. It’s yet another devastating blow for our plucky island nation after our world-class venues such as Paddons Paddocks were similarly snubbed during the Eras tour, but it doesn’t necessarily mean New Zealand didn’t have a role to play during the wedding of the year.

Pulling on all my own connections with my many best friends, all of which are in business with Travis and Taylor, here are all the ways New Zealand played a part in the wedding of the year.

New Zealander Joel Little was 100% there

God defend our goodnight nurse, because we had at least two local delegates in attendance in ‘Lover’ producer Joel Little and his wife Gemma Little. Yesterday, Little posted a photo on Instagram of the pair both dressed in black and smiling on a New York street in front of a large ornate oriental-inspired pot. “Fun night last night” his caption reads, accompanied by Taylor Swift’s ‘Love Story’. Little did not respond to The Spinoff’s desperate inquiries about the evening, but at least we know that two New Zealanders had a “fun night” while the rest of us were left with nothing but blurry paparazzi photos of rose-coloured velvet curtains.

Lorde was maybe not there, but still made an impact

Despite her attendance remaining unconfirmed, Ella Yelich-O’Connor is still flying the flag for our nation in the frenzied tabloid coverage and Reddit threads alike. “There are some friends that haven’t been spotted either,” wrote Hello magazine. “Most notably singer Lorde, who was quite tight with Taylor for several years.” Could it be that Lorde’s rekindled friendship with Charli xcx tipped her onto the Swift shit list? Or, as Rolling Stone predicted, was it just too hard having Lorde, Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff in the same room after everything? These are the questions I hope to dedicate my one wild and precious life to answering.

A lot of people who like New Zealand were there

With an estimated 1,000 guests in attendance, at least we can seek solace in the fact that there were some big New Zealand fans at the wedding, who may have even talked about their love of New Zealand at some point during the 10-hour soiree. These included late night host Stephen Colbert, famously spotted outside The Spinoff in 2019 by Toby Manhire. Colbert once dedicated a whole week of coverage to our “unbelievable” country. He was joined by the likes of Ed Sheeran, who says New Zealand “feels like home”, Reese Witherspoon, who says New Zealand is “the best place she ever worked” and Graham Norton, who loves a New Zealander in the Big Red Chair and has a long-standing collaboration with our own Invivo Wines. Speaking of wine…

There could have been some New Zealand wine there

Swift told Ellen Degeneres in 2019 that her top three favourite wines to bring to parties were sancerre, pinot grigio, and sauvignon blanc, which makes one think she would certainly have all on offer at the most important party of her life. And what better plonk to offer your guests, likely parched from talking about how much they love New Zealand all night, than Wairau River Wines’ sauvignon blanc, named a global standout in the World’s Best Sommeliers’ Selection 2026? Alas, no New Zealand wine importers based in New York have yet been brave enough to respond to The Spinoff’s desperate inquiries about what wine was on offer.

There were some undeniable local musical connections

Adam Sandler officiated the ceremony, so naturally the crowd would have been abuzz recalling the time that ‘Runnin’ by David Dallas appeared in Sandler’s 2022 Netflix sports drama Hustle. Later in the night, Paul McCartney sang ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ for the happy couple, apparently the first time he had played it live since touring in 1964. My dad John Casey wasn’t at Taylor Swift’s wedding, but he was at The Beatles’ Wellington show, 62 years ago. “It was really, really noisy,” he said of the show. “You couldn’t really hear anything because of all the screaming.”

There were a suspicious amount of trees brought in

As if to add insult to injury, multiple sources including my own eyes confirmed that Taylor Swift brought in a veritable forest of trees to transform Madison Square Garden into something that likely looked a lot more like, well, New Zealand. Swift famously shot her ‘Out of the Woods’ music video in New Zealand in 2015 and praised local set designers for their “elaborate” forest sets. “I think they have such amazing access to incredible trees and plants and things in New Zealand, that’s all I can come up with to explain why the forest sets are so good,” she said at the time.

With not a single official photograph released nor any confirmed details outside of the fact that it happened, we are left with no choice but to declare that New Zealand inspired Taylor Swift’s entire wedding. Congratulations to each and every one of us on our special, special day.