The Taylor Swift Engagement Is a Case Study On How Romance Can Become A Market Catalyst
Pop culture has always been about the big picture. But what happens when the cultural economy moves in tandem with a romance that the markets have been rooting for more than the fans?
Taylor Swift is engaged to Travis Kelce, and our Instagram feeds have been relentless ever since. The memes are multifarious; a continued testament to the creativity of the human mind, and, specifically, the Indian mind. On the softer corner of the internet, Matthew Pittman, a University of Tennessee professor, is being dubbed the best teacher ever after he dismissed class when he learnt about the engagement. “I can’t focus,” he is seen saying in the video, asking the students to leave so that they can “process” this big news. Someone in the class screams, and others squeal. If you didn’t know better, you’d think they were seconds away from a full-blown stampede.
In the more raw spaces of the internet, where reason and intellect go for a toss into outer space, there is a video of children in rural northern India pouncing on each other for their share at a buffet dinner serving noodles and pasta. It is titled Fans at Taylor Swift’s engagement party. Supposedly, it’s taking the piss out of the running joke that Swift’s target group is only the young gays and the girls. But between the University of Tennessee professor and those kids mauling each other for the choicest bowl of noodles, the world is turning: stocks of luxury brands are rising by millions of dollars, and others are recalibrating their marketing strategies to cash in on the moment. Everything in that picture-perfect shot of Swift and Kelce—the couple in each other’s arms in a leafy bower overwhelmed with pink and white roses, anemones, lilies and delphinium—is selling like hot cakes.
One might wonder if this is expected. America’s sweetheart is finally having her love story moment after a series of widely publicised heartbreaks, so of course, there will be tremors. This one’s different. Is it all calibrated and precisely thought out? Let’s not get our conspiracy hats on. What do the facts say? For starters, the Ralph Lauren black-and-white striped sundress with spaghetti straps and a smocked bodice that Swift wore in the engagement photos had been on sale for $319.99, down from $398. Naturally, it sold out within hours after Swift and Kelce’s collaboration post on Instagram. Never mind the weather, we are also going to see men replicating Kelce’s look: a navy cable-knit Ralph Lauren polo shirt with tailored khaki shorts. Louis Vuitton will have its moment under the sun, briefly. After facing backlash for the ridiculous pricing of its La Beauté Louis Vuitton range, with lipsticks costing $160 and eyeshadow palettes at $250, it is some consolation that Swift wore the brand’s Isola sandals, apart from her trusty diamond and gold Cartier Santos Demoiselle watch.
You may also like
CNBC reported that American Eagle shares jumped more than 8% on Wednesday after the retailer announced a collaboration with Kelce’s sportswear brand Tru Kolors. Much like Louis Vuitton, American Eagle is still recovering from that Sydney Sweeney ad where the Euphoria actor said in a breathy voiceover, in what seemed like the mantra for the new eugenics movement in 2025: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality and even eye colour.”
The careful, harmonious dance of these brands is, in essence, what this year has been so far: quick to react, pivot and adapt, not being a stuck-up bitch. It is the magma of our post-truth world: one that glides over parasocial relationships and results in a supersonic race to an ever-mounting peak of consumerism. In this context, anyone who views the Swift–Kelce love story as simply a love story is either missing the point or floating in a bottomless pool of delusion. This love story is an apotheosis of the romance-as-market world—its precursors being everyone from Elizabeth Taylor and Diana to Bennifer and Virushka—and there is nothing wrong with it. At a time when world leaders are struggling to revive their supine economies, this is a welcome churn. This shift is not just limited to buying from brands in their strictest sense. The National Football League (NFL) saw four million new female fans since September 2023, including 3.4 million specific to the Kansas City Chiefs’ fan base, Kelce’s team.
In 2025, romance will always be the stabilising brand story in unstable times. The sociologist Eva Illouz was spot on when she once observed that “far from being a ‘haven’ from the marketplace, modern romantic love is a practice intimately complicit with the political economy of late capitalism.” In simple English: markets don’t need rate cuts, they just need a wedding.