Fans Paid $25 for Small Bits of Garbage Found Outside Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s Wedding
Taylor Swift fans who were not invited to her wedding can still own a very unusual souvenir from the event: a tiny box of garbage collected outside the venue.
New York City artist Justin Gignac gathered litter from around Madison Square Garden after Swift married Travis Kelce there on July 3. He sealed the discarded items inside transparent cubes and listed them online for $25 each.
The limited-edition collection was titled “NYC Pocket Garbage: Not Invited Edition (Taylor & Travis’ Wedding),” and sold old pretty quickly.
According to Gignac, the items were picked up as close to the celebration as someone could get without receiving an invitation.
“I went around the perimeter,” Gignac told CBS New York. “I found a Ring Pop. I found that left AirPod, and I also found an ovulation test kit.”
The items were randomly distributed in the pocket cubes, meaning buyers could not request a particular piece of debris.
“Sorry, no requests, only telepathy,” the product description joked. “Use your crystals, totems, and vision boards to manifest the one you want.”
“Did people think I was a wedding guest who decided to clean up the streets after leaving the party?” he wrote because he was dressed up in a tux as he collected garbage. “Yes, yes, they did.”
Selling carefully packaged trash is not new for Gignac. He began the project in 2001 while completing a college internship. Gignac said he wanted to prove to a coworker that effective packaging could make almost anything desirable, even something no one would normally consider buying.
“If I could package something nobody would ever want to buy and convince people to buy it, then I knew I could prove them wrong,” he told Hyperallergic.
Gignac initially made 10 cubes and sold them from a cardboard box in Times Square for $5 each. He has since sold more than 1,700 garbage cubes to tourists, New Yorkers and international buyers.
His past collections have commemorated events including Barack Obama’s first presidential inauguration, New York’s legalization of same-sex marriage and the Yankees’ 2009 World Series victory. Gignac dates and numbers the cubes, describing them as miniature time capsules documenting culturally significant moments.
The debris was collected outside Madison Square Garden, not from inside the private reception. That means there is no proof that any particular cigarette butt, bottle cap or plastic utensil was used by Swift, Kelce or one of their famous guests.
Still, that distinction apparently did not discourage buyers.
