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It's Kylie, from the jump, who controls the tempo. The youngest Jenner and her well-oiled glam squad bounce around Milk Studios, in Hollywood, with supreme purpose. Her half-male, half-female contingent is like Ocean's Eleven, except with more crop tops and lip fillers. And instead of a case full of phony casino chips, there's just a roller bag full of luscious hair extensions that need meticulous untangling. Midway through the shoot, the photographer and stylists start praising a particular photo on the monitor, but King Kylie shuts it down. “People are going to turn it into a meme,” she says, like some kind of social-media medium. “Let's move to something else.” She later tells me that Kim and Kanye are the ones who taught her to be more assertive on creative things. “I just want the best cover photos for me and for you guys.”
Joining her in the studio is her 27-year-old partner, Travis Scott. They've been together for about a year, but this is their first photo shoot together. What's the binding force between a rage-thirsty rock star from Missouri City, Texas, and a beauty mogul of Calabasas royalty? Other than their newborn baby girl, Stormi? What's that shared frequency that's responsible for the most dynamic celebrity couple of modern times? We'll get to that, but what I can report is that it's not a mutual admiration for posing in front of a seamless. Taking pictures is a lucrative sport for one and medieval torture for the other.
Travis has a much smaller team with him. Just his manager—who works from a laptop the entire shoot—and a bag of what smells like some of California's loudest weed. Between shots, he just kind of paces around, with his head down and his lanky limbs covered in expensive clothes. A wall or photo light would stop him and send him in a different direction. He looks like one of those Microsoft screen savers from the '90s, careening off the edges of the monitor. “He was whispering to me the whole time,” Kylie tells me afterward, smirking. “He just doesn't like taking the photos.” Travis hates anything that slows him down. (He even hates restaurants; the man despises wasting time in restaurants.) And he admits that he's “impatient as a motherfucker” during photo shoots, despite really liking the end result. But it isn't simply young angst that makes hurry-up-and-wait painful for Travis. It's “la flame”—the internal fire, the rage, “the piss,” as he calls it, aggression in its funnest form. It's why Travis, a decade into a notoriously energetic career, has made his case for having the best live show in hip-hop history.
A few years ago, at a nightclub, I saw Travis swing from a chandelier while performing. One of the gold baroque leaves he held on to for dear life cut his hand, and he was beginning to bleed pretty badly. He paused for a second. Smiled. Then pressed his bloody palm against the ceiling, leaving a red handprint, and kept rapping. That energy, that commitment—that's why there's an entire generation of young tattooed daredevil rappers coming up behind him who look to Travis as the source, and who've taken his lead.
That may be the thing between the two of them, the binding force: influence. Not in some Adweek marketing sense—in direct-contact-with-the-people kind of way. When they say jump, kids will do it…off a balcony. (That actually happened to Travis.) These two make the mosh pits, memes, and moments that trend and move the needle. They forge 2017's most overused four-letter word—vibe—and they're masters at 2018's: wave. You can't pause when catching a wave. And that's their art. Their common thread. Which helps explain how their relationship went from zero to Stormi in just a few months.
“We don't go on dates,” Kylie tells me. In fact, their first date wasn't really a date. They were at Coachella—neither can remember where, exactly, they first met—and the whole thing just turned into a hang that went well. While she tells me about it, she begins to giggle about the story she told Travis that got his attention that night. The story wasn't anything special, but that's what made it real. How'd you meet your significant other? It starts normal, right?
But then their second date, by all definitions, was anything but normal. They caught the wave. Kylie Jenner—and nearly 100 million followers of hers—just abandoned her life in California and took off on tour with Travis Scott.
“Coachella was one of the stops on his tour,” she explains. “So he said, ‘I'm going back on tour—what do we want to do about this?’ Because we obviously liked each other.”
What do we want to do about this? That's an early-2000s Matthew McConaughey big-screen-heartthrob line. Holy shit. “And I was like, ‘I guess I'm going with you,’ ” she said, to complete the scene.
So you just went on tour with him?
So I just went on tour.
That's kind of crazy romantic.
Yeah?
I think so.
Yeah, I think it is, too.
You really just jumped on tour?
I really jumped on the bus. And then we rode off into the sunset. I did the whole tour with him.
What did your mom and family say?
She knows I beat to my own drum. My whole family knows that I do whatever I'm going to do. I've been that way my whole life. I don't really answer to anybody. I live on my own, and so I just rode off into the sunset. We had a lot of downtime. It was organic. And we would just go to these random cities. 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.
You seem to be impervious to a lot of things. When was the last time you cried?.
When my daughter was born. As soon as I heard her crying...
Were you in the room the entire time?
[He snaps to.] Hell yeah! It was crazy. I was there through the hell...the epidural and shit. Crazy.
I later ask Kylie about my theory on the curse. It isn't a surprise to her.
People say you and your sisters destroy the men in your lives. But my theory is, maybe it's just extremely difficult to fly this close to the sun. You were built for this level of celebrity—Travis and the other men weren't.
That's exactly what it is. They come and can't handle it.
How do you make sure that Travis doesn't burn out?
Well, for all the news stories, it's how I get over them so fast. Trav, for example, he's like, "Wait...but how do you just get over this?" He gets more angry about things. It's not just him. It's Jordyn [Kylie's best friend] who I've seen affected. It's everyone around us that aren't used to it. And we're just like, “Oh, that'll go away in a day.” I know these stories aren't going to matter, so don't even let them affect you, you know? I think you're correct. But it's not just men—it's friends, it's people who come and just don't know how to handle it. It's the negative. There's a lot of people who love us, but there's also a huge handful of people who don't like us.
So is he adapting to it all?
I don't think he's really cool with it, but he deals with it, because we love each other and we have a family. For sure, I know he doesn't like the attention. That's why we just go the extra mile to keep our relationship super private, or like, if he has events or something, I won't come. Because I want him to do his own thing. I want him to be him. I don't want it to be Kylie and Trav. If people don't ever see us together, that's okay with me, because we just do our thing.
When was the last time you cried?
Yesterday.
What happened?
Me and Travis got in a little fight. Which is normal. So I was just crying because I was just overwhelmed. It wasn't even about anything really specific. I was just overwhelmed. And then we made up an hour later. I just flew to Houston to see him for a few hours.
That's where you were yesterday! [Kylie and I were supposed to have our sit-down the day before, when she “got on a plane” for a “family matter.”] That's sweet!
Yeah. 'Cause we were fighting, and I was like, I just need to go. I didn't tell anyone where or why.
Just because we're a family now. When we fight, it's usually just because we've been away from each other for too long and we didn't see each other for like two weeks. And we have Stormi now, and I can't travel with her. She's too young. So it's harder to see each other, but I was like, I just need to go and fix this and go back.
Travis told me that he's a romantic. When I asked him what's the most romantic thing he's ever done for you, he played it cool. What would you say?.
So! When I landed in Houston to make up, he—I always kept saying I really want a Stormi chain, so when I landed, he had one made for me. But probably the most romantic thing he's done for me is, on my birthday, he woke me up out of bed at like six in the morning. He was like, “We gotta go,” and I'm just like half asleep, like, “What do you mean? What do you mean?” And he just starts pulling me, and the sun was just coming up, and he had flowers all the way down his house and violin players everywhere.
The rager!?
[laughs] The rager can have a sweet side.
This story originally appeared in the August 2018 issue with the title "Modern Family.".More photos below.
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