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 (\u201ccomplete with a custom sign made just for you at Blueprint Makerspace\u201d) and many other accounts followed suit. Pure New Zealand launched a petition to get the pair married here (\u201cNew Zealand\u2019s vineyards are the perfect toast to Forever & Always\u201d), Air New Zealand said \u201cyou\u2019d be Enchanted to walk down our aisle\u201d and even Paddons Paddock reckoned they\u2019d be perfect for afters.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
As we know now, none of that happened. Despite Luxon swearing via \u201cone of my best friends in America who is actually in business with Travis\u201d that the Chiefs star \u201cloved the offer\u201d to get married in New Zealand, the pair were rudely wed over the weekend at Madison Square Garden in New York City. It\u2019s 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<\/a>, but it doesn\u2019t necessarily mean New Zealand didn\u2019t have a role to play during the wedding of the year.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n New Zealander Joel Little was 100% there\u00a0<\/p>\n God defend our goodnight nurse, because we had at least two local delegates in attendance in \u2018Lover\u2019 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. \u201cFun night last night\u201d his caption reads, accompanied by Taylor Swift\u2019s \u2018Love Story\u2019. Little did not respond to The Spinoff\u2019s desperate inquiries about the evening, but at least we know that two New Zealanders had a \u201cfun night\u201d while the rest of us were left with nothing but blurry paparazzi photos of rose-coloured velvet curtains.\u00a0<\/p>\n Lorde was maybe not there, but still made an impact\u00a0<\/p>\n Despite her attendance remaining unconfirmed, Ella Yelich-O\u2019Connor is still flying the flag for our nation in the frenzied tabloid coverage and Reddit threads alike<\/a>. \u201cThere are some friends that haven\u2019t been spotted either,\u201d wrote Hello magazine. \u201cMost notably singer Lorde, who was quite tight with Taylor for several years.\u201d Could it be that Lorde\u2019s rekindled friendship with Charli xcx tipped her onto the Swift shit list? Or, as Rolling Stone predicted<\/a>, was it just too hard having Lorde, Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff in the same room after everything<\/a>? These are the questions I hope to dedicate my one wild and precious life to answering.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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<\/a> by Toby Manhire. Colbert once dedicated a whole week of coverage<\/a> to our \u201cunbelievable\u201d country. He was joined by the likes of Ed Sheeran, who says New Zealand \u201cfeels like home<\/a>\u201d, Reese Witherspoon, who says New Zealand is \u201cthe best place she ever worked<\/a>\u201d and Graham Norton, who loves a New Zealander in the Big Red Chair<\/a> and has a long-standing collaboration with our own Invivo Wines<\/a>. Speaking of wine\u2026<\/p>\n 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\u2019 sauvignon blanc, named a global standout in the World\u2019s Best Sommeliers\u2019 Selection 2026<\/a>? Alas, no New Zealand wine importers based in New York have yet been brave enough to respond to The Spinoff\u2019s desperate inquiries about what wine was on offer.\u00a0<\/p>\n There were some undeniable local musical connections<\/p>\n Adam Sandler officiated the ceremony, so naturally the crowd would have been abuzz recalling the time that \u2018Runnin\u2019 by David Dallas appeared in Sandler\u2019s 2022 Netflix sports drama Hustle. Later in the night, Paul McCartney sang \u2018I Want to Hold Your Hand\u2019 for the happy couple, apparently the first time he had played it live since touring in 1964. My dad John Casey wasn\u2019t at Taylor Swift\u2019s wedding, but he was at The Beatles\u2019 Wellington show, 62 years ago. \u201cIt was really, really noisy,\u201d he said of the show. \u201cYou couldn\u2019t really hear anything because of all the screaming.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n As if to add insult to injury, multiple sources including my own eyes confirmed that Taylor Swift brought in a veritable forest of trees<\/a> to transform Madison Square Garden into something that likely looked a lot more like, well, New Zealand. Swift famously shot her \u2018Out of the Woods<\/a>\u2019 music video in New Zealand in 2015 and praised local set designers for their \u201celaborate\u201d forest sets. \u201cI think they have such amazing access to incredible trees and plants and things in New Zealand, that\u2019s all I can come up with to explain why the forest sets are so good,\u201d she said at the time.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019s entire wedding. Congratulations to each and every one of us on our special, special day.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"They may not have got married here, but that doesn\u2019t mean Aotearoa wasn\u2019t the unofficial guest of honour…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":512419,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[11508,42,43,1066,6456,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-512418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-christopher-luxon","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-pop-culture","tag-taylor-swift","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=512418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512418\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/512419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=512418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=512418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=512418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n
The jury is still out on whether Lorde was at the wedding, ergo New Zealand remains in the conversation.
\nA lot of people who like New Zealand were there<\/p>\nGraham Norton surely thought about New Zealand once during the 10-hour ceremony.
\nThere could have been some New Zealand wine there<\/p>\nOver a decade ago, Taylor Swift was doing a wedding recce in a magical New Zealand forest.
\nThere were a suspicious amount of trees brought in<\/p>\n