From friendship bracelets to wedding rings: A Taylor and Travis timeline

It looks official: Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are expected to celebrate their wedding with a party at New York’s Madison Square Garden this weekend.

Speculation about the ceremony has been rife ever since the couple announced their engagement in an Instagram post last August.

The couple have said almost nothing about it, but you can’t book New York’s biggest indoor concert venue for an entire weekend without causing a few whispers.

The nuptials represent more than two celebrities tying the knot.

They’ll become one of the most powerful married couples in America, with a combined wealth of almost $2.2bn (£1.6bn), and huge sway across the music, sport, film, podcast, publishing and television industries.

But for Swifties, this is the culmination of a two-decade fairytale.

In anticipation of the big event, here’s a look at how their relationship evolved.

Travis was spotted attending Taylor’s Eras Tour when it hit Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium on 8 July 2023. He watched from a private box – but was seen meeting fans and trading friendship bracelets.

He later revealed on his New Heights podcast that he’d tried to meet Swift – but his advances were rejected, because she was protecting her voice.

“If you’re up on Taylor Swift concerts, there are friendship bracelets, and I received a bunch of them being there, but I wanted to give Taylor Swift one with my number on it,” he said later that month. “I was a little butt-hurt I didn’t get to hand her one.”

The clip went viral and got Taylor’s attention. It felt like “he was standing outside of my apartment, holding a boom box saying, ‘I want to go on a date with you’,” she later recalled.

After the podcast, Swift had “a lot of people whispering in my ear”, encouraging her to hook up with Travis. She caved in over the summer.

The couple went public on 24 September, when Taylor spent the day cheering on Travis’s American football team, the Kansas City Chiefs, alongside his mum Donna.

When he scored a touchdown, cameras caught her celebrating with an enthusiastic, “Let’s ****ing go!”. The couple later left together.

Taylor’s fans were amazed. The star had usually gone to great lengths to protect her privacy – but this was a very public launch for a new relationship.

A few days afterwards, Travis confirmed as much. “Shoutout to Taylor for pulling up!” he said on his podcast. “That was pretty ballsy.”

Two months later, in Argentina, Travis caught the Eras Tour for a second time – and Taylor made a significant change to the set in his honour.

For the last song of the night, she swapped the lyric “Karma is the guy on the screen coming straight home to me” for “Karma is the guy on the Chiefs coming straight home to me”.

When the concert wrapped, she ran into his arms for a kiss.

By this point, Taylor had completely dropped her guard.

In January 2024, the Kansas Chiefs beat the Baltimore Ravens to secure their place at the Super Bowl – and the star rushed onto the pitch for a lingering smooch with their star player.

A month later, she jetted to the Super Bowl from a concert in Tokyo, and scored another floodlit kiss when the Chiefs won.

Her presence at the games reportedly had a significant impact on viewing figures, especially among female audiences.

Taylor’s first songs about the relationship appeared in April on her double album The Tortured Poets Department.

The Alchemy appeared to reference their post-Super Bowl PDA, with the lyric “Where’s the trophy? / He just comes running over to me”.

The couple’s names were combined among some Swifties to become “Tayvis”.

Taylor and Travis went Instagram official with a photo taken backstage at a London date of the Eras Tour in June 2024. The snapshot showed the couple with Prince William and his two elder children – who’d attended the show to celebrate William’s 42nd birthday.

The following night, Travis made his stage debut as one of Taylor’s dancers. Dressed in a top hat and tails, he carried the singer across the stage to a couch where she changed outfits before performing I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.

It was his only cameo during the 149 dates of the two-year Eras Tour, but he spent most of the summer attending shows across Europe before returning to the US for the Kansas City Chiefs’ training camp.

Meanwhile, his brother Jason talked about the pressure on the couple during an appearance on Andrew Santino’s Whiskey Ginger podcast.

Comparing their relationship to the scrutiny of his own marriage to Kylie Kelce, he said: “I think we have it bad, and then we go hang out with one of them for a second.

“This is a whole other situation here… Like, you can’t be a normal person at that point.”

However, he said his brother had “evolved” along with the relationship.

“I haven’t seen him change one bit,” Jason said. “He stayed true to himself. He’s still humble. He treats everyone with the utmost respect.”

After a year of Easter egg hints and shoutouts, Tayvis confirmed their engagement with a joint Instagram post, external on 26 August 2025.

“Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married,” read the caption, signed off with a firecracker emoji, under photos of Travis proposing in a garden in Missouri.

According to US reports, the ring was purchased from Artifex Fine Jewelry. Prices for rings on its website start at about $29,000 (£21,500).

Travis’s father Ed later told ABC News that the proposal took place about two weeks before the couple shared their photos.

“He got her out there, they were about to go out to dinner, and he said, ‘Let’s go out and have a glass of wine’… they got out there, and that’s when he asked her, and it was beautiful,” he said.

“They started FaceTiming me and their mother and her folks to make sure everybody knew. So, to see them together is great.”

Taylor’s 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl, dropped in October 2025, with a flurry of lovestruck lyrics about her now fiancé.

She reminisced about date nights spent on ferris wheels, and dreamt of raising kids in a house with “a driveway with a basketball hoop”. There’s also an entire song about his, ahem, manhood.

On the promo trail, she was peppered with questions about the wedding, but gave away very little, except to tell the BBC’s Graham Norton it wouldn’t be a small affair.

Since those interviews, Team Taylor has gone quiet.

A rumoured wedding date of 13 June 2026 passed without incident. A few days later, a flurry of activity at Swift’s Rhode Island mansion had fans speculating that a bachelorette party was in full swing.

Then the New York Times reported that Swift had hired the entirety of Madison Square Gardens for a mega event just before Independence Day weekend.

According to officials with knowledge of the booking, the plans involve an intimate gathering of about 100 people on Thursday 2 July, followed by a more extravagant celebration with about 1,000 guests the next day.

TV cameras have captured trucks unloading drapes, lights, food and even a “40-inch mirror ball”.

Tabloids are speculating about wedding performers and bridesmaids. – but we’ll only know for sure, when Taylor decides it’s time.

And given that she’s recently been spotted at New York’s Electric Lady recording studios, there’s even speculation that confirmation could come in the form of a wedding song.

Watch this space.