Taylor & Travis: AI and it’s impact on the wedding industry

Unless you've been staying off the internet entirely, you'll know Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce got married at Madison Square Garden on July 3rd. And as of today, no official photos have been released. Every image, every “leaked” shot of the venue, every dreamy reception mockup doing the rounds, is AI generated. Some of it is even coming from people within the wedding industry.

Now look, I use AI every single day. It genuinely makes parts of my work better, and I'm not one of those people who thinks it's some kind of villain we need to run from. There is absolutely a time and a place for it, and the world is better off with it in plenty of ways.

But this particular use of it? Honestly, it’s giving me the ick.

Not because it's Taylor Swift, specifically. Because it's someone's wedding. A day that, real couple or global superstar, is meant to belong to the two people who lived it. And instead, we've got strangers on the internet fabricating scenes that never happened, dressing them up as if they're real, and letting them spread as “content.”

Here's the part that actually matters for you, though, if you're planning your own wedding right now.

Wedding inspiration was already a pressure cooker before this. Pinterest boards full of real weddings that cost more than most people's first home. Instagram reels of florals and lighting setups that took a professional team and a six figure budget to pull off. Plenty of couples I've worked with over the years have carried the weight of “why can’t mine look like that,” even when “that” was genuinely real and just genuinely expensive.

Now imagine that same inspiration feed, except some meaningful chunk of it isn't real at all. It's not expensive, it's not achievable, it's not anyone's actual wedding. It's a fabrication designed to look aspirational. And right now, some of it is obvious. You can tell. But it's going to get better. It's going to get harder to spot. And when it does, I genuinely don't know what happens to a couple standing in their real venue, with their real budget, comparing it to a scene that was never real to begin with.

I don't have a neat answer for where this goes. Nobody does yet, this is properly uncharted territory. But I do know what I keep coming back to, which is the same thing I've believed for the better part of fourteen years and six hundred weddings: your wedding should look and feel like you, not like a mockup someone generated for engagement. Honest, reflective of who you actually are as a couple, not chasing whatever the algorithm decided was beautiful this week.

If anything, this whole strange moment is a reminder to hold onto that a bit tighter. Plan the day that's true to you. Not the one that's trending, and definitely not the one that was never real in the first place.

x Lara