Well, they’ll always have Indio.
Sure, that’s not the exact trope, but it’s a fitting one for the Gen Z fairytale that is Kylie Jenner and Travis Scott. Because no matter how their particular journey plays out—whether they simply keep killing it as co-parents to 2-year-old daughter Stormi Webster, or live happily ever after in their Calabasas castle—the story of their Coachella meet-cute will live on.
It’s the sort of aspirational tale that could keep relationship seekers in flower crowns and fringe for years to come.
“He said, ‘I’m going back on tour—what do we want to do about this?'” Kylie recalled to GQ in their 2018 cover interview. “Because we obviously liked each other.”
That moment the billionaire cosmetics mogul and the six-time Grammy-nominated rapper knew they were going to be something would have fit perfectly in any rom-com skit. But in Kylie’s world it happened IRL during that first weekend in the California desert at 2017’s Coachella Valley Music and Art Festival. Kylie, freshly single following a split from boyfriend Tyga, was in town to host the Winter Bumbleland pool party with sister Kendall Jenner; he was performing as the fourth stop on his Bird’s Eye View Tour, but neither can pin down at what point, exactly, they met. It just happened.
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Technically, they had crossed paths more than a few times before then, but Kylie had always assumed he didn’t really like her as they had never exchanged more than a few words in all the years he’d been a member of brother-in-law Kanye West‘s G.O.O.D. Music family.
Standing in front of him in the fields of the Empire Polo Club, though, their first hang having gone extraordinarily well, it was clear just how wrong she was.
“I was like, ‘I guess I’m going with you,'” she told GQ of her response to the inquiry that kicked off their modern day love story. “So I just went on tour.” The decision made in mere moments, she hopped aboard his bus “and then we rode off into the sunset.”
As they traipsed from Wallingford, Connecticut to Pittsburgh to Portsmouth, Virginia, reveling in the rare opportunity to simply be Kylie, a teenager from Calabasas, Calif., and Jacques Berman Webster, a Houston native with a few credits from the University of Texas and a good ear for beats, they each fell hard.
“It was organic,” she explained to GQ. “We got to not be who we really were. Like, if we were in L.A., I feel like it would’ve been way different. Everything happened for a reason. We weren’t going out as ‘Kylie and Trav.’ We would just be in Cleveland, walking the street for hours. We would go on walks, and no one would bother us.”
In that nascent stage they were just like any other young people falling in love.
“We was just two kids, f–king around. Maybe, like, the first week, you don’t know if it’s real or a fling,” he told Rolling Stone in December 2018. “Then the second week you’re like, ‘Whoa, I’m still talking to her, she’s responding, I’m responding. We ain’t run out of a thing to say.’ And it got to a point where I was like, ‘I need her with me to operate. She’s that one.'”
By that point, they were already three, the couple learning mere months into their courtship that they were to become parents. “We both believe in God,” he explained to Rolling Stone, so when they learned she was expecting, “we felt like, ‘This is something special.’ And kids are something we kind of talked about when we were getting busy.”
Just like that, a little Stormi rolled in and changed everything.
When they returned to the scene of their first hang (“We don’t go on dates,” Kylie noted to GQ) a year later in 2018, she was proclaiming, “I’m not a regular mom I’m a cool mom,” as she and Scott made the trip via private plane with sister Kourtney Kardashian, then-bestie Jordyn Woodsand a seemingly endless collection of candy-colored wigs. The rapper, meanwhile, was madly in love, telling Rolling Stone he intended to propose as soon as he figured out “a fire way” to do it.
Because certainly the two were one of the industry’s hottest pair, pulling focus at that year’s MTV VMAs and generating enough buzz about the whole fam taking part in his forthcoming tour to help his 2018 disc Astroworld steal the No. 1 spot from Nicki Minaj.
And they turned up for last year’s festival, of course, their second anniversary celebrated with a kiss as they decamped their private jet. By that point the pair had become so comfortable referring to each other as husband and wife (“It’s fun for them and they’re a family, so why not?” noted a source) that it seemed as if it were simply a matter of time before those labels were made official.
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But by the time Scott was being announced as a headliner for this year’s festival the two had flamed out, deciding last fall to, as one pal put it, take some “space apart.”
And yet there’s still every reason to hope they could reign as king and queen of the desert come October when the event beloved by both music- and boho braid-enthusiasts returns. Having remained close as Kylie vowed when she tweeted, “Our friendship and our daughter is priority,” their coparenting has crossed over into something of a gray area.
Social distancing from pretty much everyone but each other and Stormi, they’ve been spending a solid chunk of time hunkering down at Kylie’s expansive home. And in between pool time and episodes of Westworld, a bit of that heat has returned.
While one pal says the two aren’t looking to put labels on their situation beyond Mom and Dad, there’s definitely still something there. “Kylie is in a great place with Travis and slowly things seem to be leading back to a romantic relationship,” a source told E! News last month. “They are best friends and don’t want to be with anyone but each other.”
So, really, just one question remains: What do they want to do about this?