NEED TO KNOW
- Kyle Ketchum attended Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, last July
- Leading up to the concert, his fiancée told him he needed to dress up. But there was one rule: no Travis Kelce jersey
- So Ketchum got creative, dressing up in a Jedi robe and holding an orange balloon to represent his favorite song, Willow
When Kyle Ketchum was invited to join his fiancé, her sister, and their dad on a trip to Germany last summer — to visit family and see Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in Gelsenkirchen — he was thrilled.
“The first thing my fiancé told me was, ‘You have to dress up. Everyone gets super into it,’ ” the Bend, Ore., local recalls to PEOPLE exclusively. But there was one rule: no Travis Kelce jersey. “She said, ‘That’s what all the other guys will be doing.’ ”
So Ketchum got creative. His favorite song of Swift’s is “Willow,” and he already owned a Jedi robe. “I figured I’d throw that on, grab an orange balloon and call it my costume,” he says.
As the show date approached, he packed the robe in his suitcase. Then, on July 17, before heading to Swift’s first show at Veltins-Arena, he stopped by a local store for a bag of balloons and blew one up on the way inside.
“I thought there’d be hundreds of people dressed like that, but there wasn’t a single one,” Ketchum, 30, says with a laugh. “Everyone was looking at me like, ‘What are you wearing?’”
Once the concert began, he fully embraced the moment. Before Willow even started, he was dancing with his glowing orange balloon. Another fan shone a flashlight underneath it, and the crowd loved it.
At one point, a group of German teenagers, who didn’t speak English, formed a circle, pulled him into the middle, and danced around him as he waved the balloon through the air.
“Suddenly, there were hundreds of phones in my face filming,” Ketchum says. “I couldn’t even see the stage because of all the phones recording me.”
“We were on the floor in the seats,” he adds, “you could maybe see five or six people holding glowing orbs, but it was just me with a balloon. There was no one else in the venue of 60,000 to 70,000 people with balloons.”
It wasn’t until the next night, when his fiancé showed him a video from the following day of the stadium filled with fans holding up orange balloons with flashlights under them, that he realized just how viral his moment had become.
“I was like, ‘What? When did this happen?’ ” he laughs.
Weeks later, he kept seeing videos of thousands of fans waving glowing orange balloons during “Willow.” “I thought, there must have been people before me that did it. There’s no way I started this,” he says.
But after some sleuthing on Instagram by his fiancé and friends, they confirmed it: “No, I think you actually started this,” they told him.
“After that, it took off at every concert,” Lindsay Nahmiache, Ketchum’s sister and co-founder and CEO of Jive PR + Digital, tells PEOPLE. “People started sharing DIY tutorials on how to make their costumes, outfits and orbs. It all kicked off from that one moment — completely spontaneous.”
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Now, even a year later, the moment continues to follow Ketchum.
Recently, he opened his phone to countless messages. “Hey, did you know they’re talking about you on a podcast?” he recalls. Confused, Ketchum thought, “What podcast?”
Then, he saw a clip of Swift and her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, talking about the balloon trend started at the Gelsenkirchen show on Kelce’s New Heights Podcast.
“I love to plan. But I also do love surprises,” Swift said on the show. “There’s a time during the European leg of The Eras Tour, there’s a song called ‘Willow’ where we do a performance where we have these — it’s a very witchy performance. We have these light-up orbs, and we’re in cloaks, and it’s all very woo. The fans decided that they were going to bring their own light-up orbs. By that, I mean balloons that they would blow up in the audience.”
“Then they would use their phone light behind it and create a light-up orb. When I tell you, I looked out. Yeah, or a glow stick, whatever. They would figure out ways to illuminate themselves. It was insane to look out and see spontaneously, thousands of these orbs just go up. I just feel like I don’t even know who organized this. Was there a group text? How did you guys even do this?”
“It was so special. It felt like we were all part of something together in a way that couldn’t be planned. As much as I love and relish in planning, it was really fun that they would do things to delight me every once in a while.”
Upon hearing Swift describe the moment, Ketchum says his mind was blown.
“It’s surreal,” he says. “I went in just having fun. I wanted something unique that represented me — Star Wars, my favorite Taylor Swift songs. I didn’t expect it to snowball like this. Honestly, it’s unbelievable. A tiny decision in my mind turned into this huge moment.”
Little did Swift know the person she was talking about was Ketchum, and that the whole phenomenon started with nothing more than a last-minute costume idea and a single balloon from a grocery store — no group chat needed.
“I hope people realize sometimes trends happen when you’re not even trying,” Ketchum says. “I had no intention of this becoming anything. I just threw on my Jedi robe, blew up a balloon and thought it looked cool. And somehow, it turned into thousands of people sharing this moment together.”
“That’s what makes it special — it was completely natural,” he adds.
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