To anyone following their two-year romance, Taylor Swift’s engagement to the American football star Travis Kelce was no great surprise. Nor was the choreographed nature of the engagement shoot.
The series of five photographs, posted on Instagram and now liked 35m times, feature the couple in various acts of staged proposal within a landscaped garden festooned with roses and urns.
The happy couple – or as they refer to themselves in the post, “your English teacher and your gym teacher” – both wore Ralph Lauren. Kelce, a navy cable-knit polo shirt and tailored shorts, and Swift a smocked white sundress which sold out moments after the post appeared. The images appear to be a peek into a private moment, yet every bloom, Cartier bracelet and rock had been stage-managed. Swift may be the world’s biggest pop star, but she’s even better at art-directing her own fairytale.
Staged engagement photos have become one of the wedding industry’s freshest traditions, a way for couples to mark the moment – or at least a curated version of it.
In the past few years, Alline Beatrici has been photographing proposals and engagements alongside weddings. “This is very much a proposal shoot rather than an engagement shoot,” says Beatrici, who prefers a more naturalistic pose-free style. “Sometimes I’ll be hiding in a bush waiting for the proposal,” she says, “after which I’ll let things settle for half an hour, then go back for the engagement photos.”
“It’s not out of the question that the [Swift/Kelce] proposal was a surprise, but these are celebrities so I suspect not. It’s a [giveaway] when people have their nails done.”
Capturing these milestones, or moments of “micro-commitment”, began as an add-on for wedding photographers and a way of practising being in front of the camera before the big day. “I usually photograph them a few months after the engagement, but 80% of them won’t have a wedding date,” Beatrici says. The growth of the phenomenon in recent years is largely down to Instagram and TikTok, a symptom of how much social media feeds into marriage tradition. Beatrici encourages her couples to pick a meaningful venue rather than a photogenic one, but admits that the demands of social media tend to influence.
Swift’s ability to emit sincerity, however orchestrated the situation, has been a crucial exercise in her image-building as a pop star, especially online. “It’s an easy way to communicate with a fanbase by showing an intimate glimpse into their life,” says Kadian Pow, a lecturer in sociology at Birmingham City University.
“Nothing Taylor Swift does is just a simple celebration,” says Pow. “Last week she was on a podcast about her new album, now she’s announcing her engagement? It’s a nicely done tie-in … a way to have the fans and the media preoccupied with her narrative,” she says. It’s also a way to control that narrative, while galvanising the all-important parasocial relationships with fans. “There is an idea firmly entrenched that she was the nerdy girl lusting after a football player. In some ways it sends the message that she was able to manifest this. It’s part of her crafting of a persona.”
For celebrities, engagement shoots now rival the pregnancy shoot, a well-worn trope in the fame-fashion alliance ever since Demi Moore appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991. Flowers tend to feature, as seen in Beyoncé’s Botticelli-esque pregnancy shoot from 2017, as does what you might call “relatable” styling, says Pow.
At £230, her dress is relatively cheap for a high-end label. “You’re not supposed to look too dressed up for an engagement – lest you were expecting it – nor would they want to come across as anything other than clean and put-together,” says Avery Trufelman, of the critically acclaimed fashion podcast Articles of Interest. “The preppy look is casual, and yet has a degree of formality to it.”
It helps, too, that it was on sale when the images dropped. Swift usually avoids luxury fashion in order to underscore her relatable image. But as a designer, Ralph Lauren is the sartorial embodiment of the wholesome American dream. “They, like Ralph himself, were very aware of the fairytale aspirational imagery they were making, and costumed themselves for the part,” says Trufelman. It also “aligns with the times that we’re in: the trad wife aesthetic”, adds Pow.
The styling is also evocative of the 1970 film Love Story, which coined the term “preppy’ while using fashion to denote class. Even Kelce’s sockless loafers are a code straight from 1980s’ The Preppy Handbook, which advised “loafers worn at the country club, never with socks”.
Kelce’s shorts may seem informal, but there is a grand tradition for men to hide rings inside their short pockets, which only furthers the calculated spontaneity behind the images – as if he really did just propose.
Relatability has been “par for the course forever”, says Pow. It’s just the flowers that betray them, says florist Julia Campbell-Gillies who thinks, given the season, the roses “would have been flown over from Ecuador and Colombia – I really hope they weren’t just for the photo-op”. And of course the bezel-cut Artifex diamond ring – which, according to Brides magazine, cost half a million dollars.
