Has becoming a father changed your relationship with your parents?
“No, not at all, man. It’s actually cool, because now we have things to relate on, right? Just raising a daughter. I’m always talking to my parents. They try to remind me of how I was when I was a kid.”
And how was that kid?
“I was energetic. I was super energetic. Jumping off of the walls…”
That hasn’t changed, though.
We both laugh. “Nah. It’s so funny to my mom,” he says. “She’d be like, ‘Yo, you don’t get tired?’ ”
It was Scott’s mother who got him into fashion. He’d thumb through her copies of Vogue and Architectural Digest, and he speaks with wonderment about her collection of bags and trunks from Coach and Louis Vuitton and Prada. “Every Christmas she would always have me in a full Nautica fit or a full Purple Label Ralph Lauren fit or some RRL. She’s putting me in this, and I’m just going with the flow,” he recalls. “A lot of this stuff is expensive. My mom, she did a lot and worked very hard to get us what we wanted.”
He doesn’t remember the first time something he wore mattered to one of his fans, but now he can’t post a fit pic on the Gram without sparking collaboration rumors on Hypebeast. The Travis Scott Nikes he’s been doing since 2017 are so coveted that a few shops made public pleas to his fans to stop calling and emailing about their availability. “Travis dropped right into the Kanye, Pharrell, Virgil, Drake world,” says StockX cofounder Josh Luber, “this blurred line between fashion, music, sports superstar culture.”
Scott struggles to articulate what exactly it is that he thinks has drawn people so intensely to his gear. “I’m trying to just cook, trying to create,” he says. “It’s so hard to speak for people, because I’m always moving forward like, ‘What are we cooking next?’ ”
He has, however, put a lot of thought into the messages he’s trying to send in his work with fashion brands. “I do have a mission statement,” he says. “Everything is for the performer and the performance athlete. Performing is a sport, and it’s a drive. It’s so dope to play on the same fields as sporting events. So the whole mission is just to create—whether it’s footwear, or whether it’s apparel—for that mindset. For just living your life on the go.”
He goes on: “If you want to just hoop, if you want to go to work, if you want to go out to a party, if you want to go to a meeting, if you want to go look at some art, if you want to do anything. It’s so amazing to even see people reacting and liking what we have offered.”
Much of what drives Scott’s interest in fashion collaborations is creating access. I ask him to elaborate on that strategy, if there is one. “I try to do things with people I know or someone I have a connection with,” he says. “Sometimes a lot of these companies are so big, they kind of forget about the people who walk the streets every day, [the people] that keep everything moving. So it’s just about giving people that access, giving something that caters to them.”
At one point Scott excuses himself to answer his phone, which has been buzzing incessantly. He ignored the last two calls and offers his apologies to go take this one. Houston, we have a problem: About a month before, Scott reportedly dropped $23.5 million on a 16,700-square-foot Brentwood mansion that’s wrapped in a curvaceous sheet of metal to evoke the lines of a modern yacht. The custom bed he ordered for his room, from the fashion designer Rick Owens, might not fit, and Scott’s designer wants to know if they should even try. “That shit weighs like a building,” Travis says with a laugh.