The United States couldn’t have a royal family so they had Disney instead. They made up princesses and put them in fabulous outfits, created songs and movies and fake-castle theme parks based around these princesses that got young girls obsessed with being hot and adventurous and in command, and at the same time destined their storylines to end with a wedding.
So hear me out. Americans now have their first living royal Disney princess: Taylor Swift. The billionaire “poet laureate of puberty” singer, unmatched in her record-breaking sales and influence, regularly the most streamed artist on Spotify, is now engaged to Travis Kelce (if you had no idea who her American football player boyfriend was, don’t worry. As in every fairytale, Prince Charming is not that important.)
“Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married”
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Swift’s wedding will be for millennial and Generation Z women the royal wedding of their lives, albeit with catchier songs. And by royal wedding I mean this: an admirable commitment to anticool cringe, a joint brand-building exercise, strange gender politics, and a personal romance deliberately marketed to be overwhelmed by the obsession of millions of strangers.
Disney theme parks are advertised — dubiously — as the “happiest places on earth”. Every attendee I’ve met of Swift’s 2024 Eras Tour — earning $2 billion, the highest-grossing concert tour of all time — genuinely reported that those stadiums seemed like the happiest places on earth. They were filled with teenage girls who grew up belting out semi-empowering Disney songs from Frozen and graduated to belting out Swift. She was their princess, but the tour, for all its money, was careful to avoid the distancing of expensive staging.
“You’ll be the prince and I’ll be the princess,” they chanted along with Swift to her song Love Story, as if she were not in real life rich beyond royalty. “It’s a love story, baby, just say yes.”
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That the announcement of her engagement is as craftily deployed — Swift has a new album coming out in October — as the rest of the Swift story doesn’t make her wedding any less fascinating in its mass appeal. That the Disney model was highly commercial didn’t mean it couldn’t provide a joy that brought punters together in a way they didn’t know they craved. So much of Disney was based on the British royal wedding business model, after all.
See, for example, Kelce in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 2023 about how he fell in love with Swift, and how he “manifested” it all. He showed the journalist a shooting star drawn on the internal ceiling of his Rolls-Royce. Kelce urged him, unironically, to use this star to “make a wish — dreams come true”. The Swift story is not rock’n’roll, it’s Rolls-Royce relatable.
Swift is a powerful musician and businesswoman, but her genius is for straddling these extreme ends of rich and relatable. She announced the engagement to her 281 million Instagram followers with the line “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married”, a wink to her fame and her familiarity.
The photographs were artfully unpolished. The richest or most elite can, if they are very adept, offer us a universal experience by becoming a projection. Haven’t we all dreamt upon a star — non-luxury car version? Haven’t we all wished that a bad boyfriend got boiled like a frog or had his head on a stake, to compare this to Swift’s habit of imprisoning her famous ex-boyfriends in the lyrics of rude revenge songs?
Yes, it’s just two 35-year-olds getting married. But also yes, in the case of Swift, it’s the end of an era that was the foundation of her brand. If you were a girl growing up watching Disney movies or reading the fairytales they were based on, you were getting educated in a complicated two-way message. The young girl was the star of the show. But the end of the drama, in every way, was settling down.
In the same way Swift always gave off strong feminist energy. But it was a proud single woman energy. She signed off her endorsement of Kamala Harris in the last presidential election as “childless cat lady”, baiting the Republican JD Vance on a remark he had made denigrating single women. That energy fed off the biofuel provided by burning her exes. What next when that runs out? Swift is a supremely talented singer-songwriter. She hustled her way up in the country music business from her ordinary Pennsylvania background from the age of 11. But in her twenties her habit of dating celebrities meant every high hit the tabloid headlines and every low was monetised in barely coded lyrics, in a highly efficient closed loop.
Cut to the Brit awards in 2013, a case in point. Swift arrived on stage in a white wedding dress, which she ripped off to reveal a black playsuit. She sang her hit I Knew You Were Trouble, a message she served hot and in person to Harry Styles, the British pop star and her ex-boyfriend, standing metres away.
With Harry Styles in Central Park, December 2012
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With Calvin Harris in New York, May 2015
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In an interview with The Times afterwards (she has since regally withdrawn from most interviews), Swift acknowledged that the song was about Styles, who inadvertently helped her performance by being in her eyeline as she ripped the wedding dress from her body. “Well, it’s not hard to access that emotion,” Swift said, “when the person the song is directed at is standing by the side of the stage watching.”
Often her boyfriends were cooler than her, or less determined, or more British. Her longest relationship had lasted six years and was with the north London-raised actor Joe Alwyn. No matter. She spun her break-ups into stories in which the woman comes out on top, which we don’t often witness in the mainstream.
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With Joe Alwyn in January 2020
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The career of the British actor Tom Hiddleston took a while to recover from his being photographed wearing an “I ♥ TS” vest. The musician John Mayer said that after their relationship he was “humiliated” by her Dear John song with the lyric: “Dear John … don’t you think I was too young to be messed with?” Swift retorted to Mayer that the suggestion the song was about him was “presumptuous … I never disclose who my songs are about.” Ha, good one.
Before meeting Kelce she broke up with the British musician Matty Healy, widely understood to be the subject of her song The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived, with lyrics such as “In public, showed me off/ Then sank in stoned oblivion.”
With Tom Hiddleston in Los Angeles in July 2016
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It helped her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, break multiple records, including the fastest album to reach a billion streams on Spotify in its first week. When Swift broke up with someone she did it with a power of which her young female followers could only dream. Young women worried about their exes and issues such as revenge porn; Swift gave them a dream of revenge pop.
Like completing a fairytale task that finished off many more complicated or challenging men, Kelce seems to have cracked the code. He has satisfied Swift and her fans as a suitor by being unequivocally and publicly devoted. Kelce says Swift is “hilarious” and a “genius”, and said that even after scrutinising all her break-up lyrics he is determined to be the one to break the spell with lavish and self-abasing praise. “I’ve never been a man of words,” Kelce said. “Being around her, seeing how smart Taylor is, has been f***ing mind-blowing. I’m learning every day.”
• Taylor Swift fans hold their breath for the wedding of their lives
Meanwhile, she seems to be changing too. She embraces domesticity. Appearing on his podcast recently, Swift talked about her hobbies: “I like to sew. I specialise in children’s purses and baby blankets.” Baking bread “has taken over my life”. She is happy to be photographed in an apron, she wears floral dresses and says her hobbies are from the 1700s, “I get all granny shit.” It’s hardly “trad wife”, but it’s soothing in a similar way. After her “cat lady” political abrasiveness, her more conservative demographic may be wooed back.
For a generation of women, this Swift era is drawing to a close with the triumph and sadness of a Disney wedding: she is figuratively ripping off the black playsuit to reveal the white dress. Historically a wedding was the last moment the bride outshone the groom, her day of sparkling stardom.
Swift has told the story backwards. She has found a successful, ultra-macho man who nevertheless seems content to live in the shadow of a woman who is far richer and more powerful than him. Perhaps that is the fairytale ending her young female fans deserved, one they can only dream of. Perhaps that makes her a kind of queen.