- Kylie Jenner and Timothée Chalamet recently made their red carpet debut as a couple.
- They have reportedly been dating for about two years, but some fans still think it's an odd pairing.
- PR experts told BI that creating an air of mystery or even confusion works to the couple's advantage.
Despite nearly two years of sightings, smooches, and soft launches, Kylie Jenner and Timothée Chalamet's relationship still feels like a glitch in the Hollywood matrix.
Even when the couple made their long-awaited red carpet debut last week after several PDA-filled public outings, some still struggled to accept the news.
"i still can't believe kylie & timothee is a real thing," one user wrote on X.
Jenner and Chalamet's relationship has been defined by skepticism since rumors of their pairing first surfaced in 2023. Social media users wondered what these two stars — one who rose to fame on a gaudy reality show, the other in the world of Oscar-worthy cinema — could possibly have in common.
"I firmly believe they sit together in complete silence," one person wrote on X. Such reactions to Jenner and Chalamet are not confined to social media's most hyperactive posters; I've heard them firsthand. A friend of mine recently said she couldn't shake the feeling that Jenner and Chalamet "don't exist in the same celebrity timeline."
Conventional wisdom suggests a relationship this puzzling could be bad business for both parties. But it turns out that confusing the pop culture-following public can actually be a smart strategy.
Two public relations experts who spoke to Business Insider said that the ongoing stream of confused responses to this celebrity coupling actually represents a job well done by Jenner and Chalamet's respective PR teams.
It's a sign that both of their carefully cultivated individual brands are strong. So if you feel the friction from those brands clashing, you're not alone — that's precisely what makes the couple so fun to doubt.
A tale of two very different celebrities
Evan Nierman, the CEO of the crisis PR firm Red Banyan, described Jenner's brand as ultra-visible, social media-heavy, and incessantly self-promotional. Meanwhile, Chalamet has made a point of pitching himself as an artist with discernment and taste.
"The problem that people are having is those two different personas seem at odds with one another," Nierman explained. "The kind of brooding, super-serious, super-authentic actor clashes with the Kardashian model, and I think that's probably why people are having such a hard time understanding the pairing of the two of them."
In reality, the public's reaction to Jenner and Chalamet as a couple has nothing to do with their personalities or compatibility behind closed doors. It has everything to do with brand positioning and integration strategies, likely orchestrated — or, at the very least, closely monitored — by large teams of publicists, image consultants, and managers (in Jenner's case, a "momager").
"PR can play a much bigger role in the things that you see coming out of Hollywood than most people at home would guess," Mike Fahey, the founder and CEO of the PR agency Fahey Communications, told Business Insider. "A lot of those things that seem like happy accidents are actually by design."
However, there's an important distinction between our traditional understanding of a "PR relationship," one that's been orchestrated by celebrities' respective teams to generate mutually beneficial publicity, and a real relationship that has been carefully managed by PR to maximize its impact.
Yes, celebrities have a lot to gain by cross-pollinating their fan bases. But the "Kymothée" curiosity feels different from, say, Tom Hiddleston getting papped wearing a T-shirt declaring his love for Taylor Swift.
Jenner and Chalamet are simply too odd a match for people to believe they have a calculated arrangement, or that they're being prodded to perform affection for the cameras. To what end? To cross-promote "Dune" on "The Kardashians"? To sell a Bob Dylan-inspired makeup line by Kylie Cosmetics?
So something must be keeping them together. Could it be… love? Well, yes, maybe. Why not?
The slow rollout of Kymothée was PR perfection
The initial media rollout of Jenner and Chalamet's relationship was drawn out over several months, nudged along by blurry photos of Jenner's car in Chalamet's driveway and anonymous tips sent to gossip aggregator Deuxmoi before the two were eventually spotted kissing at a Beyoncé concert in September 2023. Even when Jenner and Chalamet attended several awards shows together, including two consecutive Golden Globes, they avoided the spectacle of a red carpet appearance as a couple until just last week.
A power couple's red carpet debut is a big deal in Hollywood — for comparison, Swift has never walked one with any boyfriend — but Jenner and Chalamet still kept it relatively low-key. Instead of posing for photos together at a star-studded event like the Met Gala or the Oscars, they staged their official debut at a sparsely attended ceremony in Rome: the David di Donatello Awards, where Chalamet received an honorary award for cinematic excellence.
Their relationship's incremental, tempered launch created plenty of space for suspicion and conspiracy theories to flourish. But counterintuitively, both Nierman and Fahey said that isn't necessarily a bad thing.
"It's leading to more confusion, but it's also doing exactly what it's intended to do, which is sparking ever-more interest," Nierman said. "A series of slow strategic leaks that are then followed by a red carpet debut is a PR move that's designed to generate buzz and to get people talking."
If Jenner and Chalamet had opted for a hard launch — a formal announcement, perhaps, or a sit-down interview for a magazine cover — it could have encouraged fans to come to grips with their romance more quickly, or to understand their connection more deeply. That would take away the mystique, which is the very thing that's keeping us interested.
"If I were a Kardashian and I was sitting on this relationship, I would do the exact same thing. I would be like, 'I want to get as much mileage out of this as possible. It means that I don't have to do other things. Let's milk this for all it's worth,'" Fahey said. "They've created this media firestorm while doing very little."
More than two years after Jenner and Chalamet were linked, they still have valuable cards to play — their first selfie shared on Instagram, for example, or Chalamet's debut appearance on "The Kardashians."
"When that happens, it's going to be a big cash cow payday for them, and that's why they're so deliberate in what they do," Fahey said of the Oscar nominee's seemingly inevitable appearance on Jenner's Hulu reality show. "There are no accidents in the Kardashian family."
Each new milestone will likely spawn a new round of headlines, TikToks, and heated debates in my group chats. I anticipate receiving many more texts like, "I can't believe they're still together," and "I still don't get it."
Here, "still" is the operative word. The ongoing disbelief that Jenner and Chalamet are a match is not a symptom of a PR rollout gone wrong. In fact, it's probably the opposite.
"It's been played to perfection," Nierman said. "It keeps us guessing, it keeps us talking, and that's entirely the point."
