It’s nice to have an intimate wedding. It’s nice to have a low-key wedding. It’s nice to have a casual wedding.
This article is not about those kinds of weddings.
The operative adjective here is “lavish.” Lavish décor, lavish dresses, a lavish guest list. And at the end, a lavish price tag.
It remains to be seen if renting out Madison Square Garden this weekend will be enough to put Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce atop of the list of extravagant weddings.
Here are the weddings they may or may not out-lavish.
July 4, 1999: Dublin; 225 guests
‘Posh Spice’ and David Beckham
Mr. Beckham, the English soccer star, and Victoria Adams, the Spice Girls member known as Posh Spice, were (and continue to be) modern British royalty, and they chose a 15th-century castle for their ceremony.
Ms. Adams wore a crown worth more than $10,000, and the couple sat on golden thrones on a raised platform, as if to look down on their guests, with benevolence (or disdain). The wedding cake was topped with a nude sculpture of the pair.
The Bishop of Cork presided. A planned performance by Elton John was canceled because of an illness, but the night closed with a fireworks display.
July 29, 2000: Malibu, Calif.; 200 guests
Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt
There are few boldfaced names bolder than Mr. Pitt and Ms. Aniston, who married on a bluff overlooking the Pacific.
Melissa Etheridge and Billy Preston were the lead performers, along with a 40-person gospel choir, and the decorations featured 50,000 flowers. Dinner came with a wall of caviar. (No, that word wasn’t “tray” or “platter.” It was “wall.”)
They divorced five years later.
Dec. 1-2, 2018: Jodhpur, India; 400 guests
Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas
Western and Indian ceremonies each got their own day.
The star of the Western ceremony was Ms. Chopra’s outfit. The Ralph Lauren gown included 135 satin-covered buttons, 5,600 beads, 11,000 Swarovski crystals and, at least according to Ralph Lauren, two million sequins. Making the gown took 1,826 hours of work by 15 people. The bride’s veil was 75 feet long.
The star of the Hindu ceremony was, again, Ms. Chopra’s outfit. Her lehenga, a traditional ankle-length Indian skirt, took 110 workers 3,720 hours to make. Mr. Jonas, who arrived on horseback, and his family members also wore traditional Indian outfits.
July 12, 2024: Mumbai, India; 1,200 guests
Radhika Merchant and Anant Ambani
A host of Bollywood and cricket stars, along with an eclectic mix of celebrities such as Mark Zuckerberg, Ivanka Trump, John Cena and Boris Johnson, were in attendance for the wedding of the son of the billionaire businessman Mukesh Ambani, among the richest men in Asia.
Luis Fonsi performed his massive hit “Despacito” (Who could resist hearing that one more time?), and Rihanna, Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, the Backstreet Boys and Pitbull performed at various pre-wedding events. In all, the festivities lasted the whole month.
About 100,000 flowers were used to make floral elephants and monkeys. Thousands lined the streets for glimpses of the rich and the celebrated.
It was generally considered to be the most expensive wedding of all time, with a total bill estimated to be at least half a billion dollars.
June 27, 2025: Venice; 200 guests
Lauren Sánchez and Jeff Bezos
The Amazon founder and his bride celebrated with three days of parties. Sánchez wore more than 25 outfits for various events. One was an Oscar de la Renta cocktail dress with 175,000 crystals.
The main ceremony was on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, and the guest list included Tom Brady, Orlando Bloom and Oprah Winfrey. The full price tag may have been around $50 million.
Not everyone was in a celebratory mood. Protesters under the banner of “No Space for Bezos” objected to the ostentation.
Royal Nuptials
Royal weddings belong in a category of their own, and their grandeur lasts from generation to generation: Princess (later Queen) Elizabeth married Philip Mountbatten in Westminster Abbey in 1947. (“We cousins in America share the pleasure in the marriage pageantry and fancy we can hear the organ’s distant peal,” The New York Times editorialized.)
Their son Charles married Diana Spencer in 1981 at St. Paul’s Cathedral, and that couple’s son William married Kate Middleton in 2011 at the Abbey. All of the events included horses, carriages, Handel, and tens or even hundreds of thousands of spectators lining London’s streets.
One of history’s grandest royal weddings joined the future Louis XVI of France to Marie Antoinette in 1770 at the Palace of Versailles. Marie, 14, wore a dress covered in diamonds.
A fireworks show for the common folk in the Place de Louis XV (now the Place de la Concorde) went awry, setting off a fire and a stampede; the official death toll was 132, but many have estimated to be far higher.
The marriage also didn’t end all that well for its protagonists, or for the monarchy in general. Louis and Marie were guillotined in the same square as the fireworks disaster.
The Kardashians
Kardashian weddings also need their own category. Kim Kardashian and Kanye West married in 2014. The rehearsal dinner was at the Palace of Versailles (hmm, bad omen?) and the wedding venue was a fort in Florence, Italy. Private planes transported the guests. John Legend, Lana del Rey and Andrea Bocelli performed. The marriage, Ms. Kardashian’s third, ended in 2022.
Kourtney Kardashian married Travis Barker, the drummer from the band Blink-182, quickly in Las Vegas in 2022, but minimalism was not in the cards for long. They soon hosted a celebration in a villa owned by Dolce & Gabbana in Portofino, Italy. Mr. Bocelli also performed at that reception. They remain married.
Daisy Fay and Tom Buchanan
OK, this one is fictional. But it surely ranks up there.
In the 1925 novel “The Great Gatsby,” Daisy and Tom Buchanan get married “with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before.”
“He came down with a hundred people in four private cars, and hired a whole floor of the Muhlbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote.
Sadly, just before the bridal dinner, Daisy is found “drunk as a monkey.”
The marriage wasn’t any better. Tom cheats repeatedly; Daisy takes up with Jay Gatsby. People get shot. The marriage endures, at least at the end of the novel, but serves as a cautionary tale.
Weddings, no matter how lavish, can end in disaster, or even a trip to the guillotine.