Swift

Nobody is shaking this off: Pop superstar Taylor Swift and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce announced their engagement on Instagram on Tuesday, and the likes exploded like pyrotechnics at a concert. The post broke Instagram’s record for reposts, even though, to be fair, reposting just started on Instagram in August. Still, the post hit 1 million reposts in less than 6 hours and earned 14 million likes in just the first hour. By Tuesday evening, it had topped 21.2 million likes.

“Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married,” Swift and Kelce wrote on an Instagram post showing multiple photos of the proposal. In the first photo, Kelce is kneeling in front of Swift in a breathtaking floral garden. The second photo shows them standing and holding one another. The next is her hand with an enormous diamond engagement ring, followed by two more of the couple embracing.

The two apparently got engaged in a breathtaking garden setting.

Instagram

The post also features a dynamite emoji and the audio of Swift’s 2024 song So High School. The snippet cuts off with the lyrics, “Are you gonna marry, kiss, or kill me?” (Let’s hope it’s the first or second option.)

Instagram post is already climbing into the millions 

As you might expect, the Instagram post delivering the engagement news shot into the stratosphere as soon as it was posted on Tuesday. A representative for Instagram confirmed to CNET that Swift and Kelce’s engagement announcement earned over 14 million likes and 452,000 reposts in just over an hour, reaching 21.2 million by 5 p.m. PT Tuesday.

That’s a huge audience, but it will be interesting to see how high up Swift and Kelce’s engagement news post lands on Instagram’s all-time most popular list.

Right now, the most popular post ever on Instagram is from 2022, when soccer star Lionel Messi posted an image of himself hoisting the just-won World Cup. That post has more than 74 million likes. (Swifties, keep it going if you want to send that post to the top.) 

The Instagram representative didn’t immediately comment on whether Swift and Kelce’s post is climbing at the same pace as Messi’s. Messi also has the third-most popular post, again showing him and the World Cup trophy, this time snuggled up in bed together.

But it’s not just soccer photos that top the Instagram most-viewed-ever list. The second most-liked post of all time is a photo of a plain, ordinary egg, posted to the social network back in 2019 as part of someone’s experiment to see if such a mundane image could go hugely viral. I interviewed the person behind Eugene the Egg back in 2019 and am shocked to see it’s still in the No. 2 spot six years later, with more than 60 million likes.

As of Tuesday evening, the post’s 21.2 million likes put it just outside the top 20 list of most-liked, non-soccer posts, just behind post No. 20, singer Billie Eilish’s 2021 reveal of her then-new blond hair. Eilish’s post is at 21.9 million likes and could easily fall off the list and be replaced by Swift and Kelce.

Details on the ring and outfits

According to The New York Post, Swift is wearing a blue silk-blend Polo Ralph Lauren dress in the photo, and Kelce is wearing a navy cable-knit Polo Ralph Lauren sweater. The Post also reports that Swift’s new engagement ring is “an old mine brilliant-cut diamond in a gold bezel setting, which was designed by Kelce himself with the help of Kindred Lubeck of Artifex Fine Jewelry.”

Taylor Swift’s style of engagement ring was the most popular cut during the Georgian and Victorian eras.

Instagram

Old mine refers to a historic diamond cut popular from the early 18th century to the late 19th century. Such diamonds are square with rounded corners and have 58 facets, making them anything but a “paper ring.”

The Post delved into everything else Swift had on, including her cognac-colored Louis Vuitton sandals, $18,000 diamond-studded Cartier Santos Demoiselle watch and her “TNT” friendship bracelet by Wove, which was a Christmas gift from her new fiancé.

To no one’s shock, the $400 dress Swift is wearing is selling out fast. Just imagine the excitement when the wedding details start trickling out, and Swift begins to “pick out a white dress,” as Juliet does in Swift’s hit song Love Story.

Memeing the marriage proposal

Until we have more information about the upcoming wedding, fans will have to content themselves by creating and sharing memes because, well, it’s 2025, and that’s part of how we communicate these days.

The Instagram account belonging to the Prince and Princess of Wales even liked the post. (No surprise, really, they hung out when Swift played London.)

Instagram

Even coffee giant Starbucks got into the act, making a joke about pumpkin spice lattes and posting, “Are we supposed to keep posting about PSL like nothing happened?” The company also noted in the post’s comments that “the long list of Starbucks lovers just got a +1.” (“Starbucks lovers” is a sly reference to a lyric in Swift’s 2014 song Blank Space. Swift actually sings, “got a long list of ex-lovers,” but almost anyone with working ears mishears it as something like, “all the lonely Starbucks lovers.”

Starbucks’ announcement of the pumpkin spice latte’s return was buried by Swift’s news.

Instagram

One meme post on X showed Paul Revere’s famed ride, captioned “me telling everyone I know that Taylor Swift got engaged.”

me telling everyone I know that Taylor Swift got engaged pic.twitter.com/MpS8BLPOZj

— Siobhan ✨ (@Siobachka) August 26, 2025

One Bluesky user wrote, “Very interesting that Taylor Swift got engaged mere months after I did. Get your own thing.”

Bluesky/Screenshot by CNET

Another joked, “Can’t believe that on July 8th, 2023, @likethe309, Travis Kelce and I all walked into Arrowhead Stadium to attend the Eras Tour and now one of us is marrying Taylor Swift.”

Bluesky/Screenshot by CNET

Matt Ufford warned the billionaire bride-to-be and her NFL star husband to count their pennies, writing, “a word of warning to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce: weddings can get EXPENSIVE, fast, be sure to leave enough in the account for your monthly expenses.”

Bluesky/Screenshot by CNET

There were football jokes, of course.

Bluesky/Screenshot by CNET Bluesky/Screenshot by CNET

The Detroit Free Press sought a local connection, using the headline, “Tight end for Detroit Lions’ Week 6 opponent gets engaged to Taylor Swift.”

Screenshot by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper/CNET

One person questioned the caption about an English teacher marrying a gym teacher, asking, “Why does Taylor Swift think she’s an English teacher and not a music teacher?”

Bluesky/Screenshot by CNET

We’re pretty sure this person really does know who Swift is, but their post was funny anyway. It reads, “Okay, I’ll bite: who’s Taylor Swift? What’s so great about him?”

Bluesky/Screenshot by CNET

The two 35-year-old celebrities have been dating for two years. It’s a love story, and Taylor just said yes.

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