It all started with a friendship bracelet and a light roasting. The rest, as we can see from the way Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce dominate the headlines every time they go out, is celebrity relationship history.
On Tuesday evening, Swift and Kelce tried (key word tried) to escape notice when they stepped out for a date night at Los Angeles’s Bird Street Club. The duo attempted to thwart the waiting lenses by ducking down in the backseat of the vehicle they were riding in, to limited success. Earlier in the evening, the car was spotted with a white sheet tacked up between the front and back seats in a sort of makeshift privacy barrier, though the conspicuous attempt at privacy may have attracted more attention than it diverted.
An onlooker at the restaurant told Page Six that Swift and Kelce, who went public with their relationship in September 2023 after getting to know one another in secret, looked “stylish and happy” at the restaurant.
“They were low-key, very tall!” the source said. “They were with two other people.”
Indeed, on the latest episode of the New Heights podcast that he co-hosts with brother Jason Kelce, released Wednesday, Travis confided in guest Lil Dicky, after the topic of Swift bubbled up, that he is happy. “I’m having a blast in life, baby,” Travis said on the pod. “Just flying high. Enjoying it all. Bringing new lives to the football world.”
The 36-year-old rapper seemed just as enchanted by the romance between Swift and the Kansas City Chiefs tight end as civilian onlookers, giddily describing the dynamic between the two.
“The world is kind of like high school, where your most popular popstar beloved musician somehow met your most popular beloved athlete and they actually fell in love and it’s real,” Lil Dicky said. “I don’t know, I think anyone who hates on it is, like, a bitter loser. But I think a lot of people who you would maybe expect to hate on it actually love it and they acknowledge they love it because there’s something so American about it.”
So there, dads, Brads, and Chads.
“I appreciate that,” Travis responded, with Lil Dicky adding that “there’s something just classic about it.”
Travis admitted, laughing, that when it comes to his origin story with Swift, “I don’t know how I did it.”
“She’s not, she wasn’t into sports,” he said, “so I don’t know how the fuck I did it.”
Emotionally, that is. He laughed that “I know exactly how I did it,” in terms of the details, the public version of which are etched into public consciousness: Travis attended Swift’s Eras Tour show in Kansas City in July 2023 and showed up with a friendship bracelet with his phone number emblazoned in beads, hoping to meet the singer and gift it to her. Cute, but it didn’t work. At least, not in the way he’d hoped.
“She doesn’t meet anybody, or at least, she didn’t want to meet me, so I took it personal,” he said on a late-July episode of New Heights. “But it was an unbelievable show.”
The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the rebuffed Super Bowl winner who genially complains about it to his brother on his very popular podcast gets the internationally renowned billionaire pop star, it would appear. In her Time Person of the Year profile, Swift saluted Travis for his determination in making his way into her heart, saying he got her attention when he “very adorably put me on blast on his podcast, which I thought was metal as hell,” and the two started secretly hanging out shortly after, going public in September when Swift attended one a Chiefs game then literally drove off into the sunset with Travis after. “Ballsy,” Travis called it on the podcast later that week.
She may not have been into sports back then, but now Swift says “Football is awesome, it turns out.” She’s been to more than a dozen games in the last year, including the Super Bowl, and has the bedazzled purse to match. My, how times have changed.
