Jools Lebron Always Knew She’d Be a Superstar
It’s 10 p.m. on Thursday, the night before the official first day of New York Fashion Week, and Jools Lebron, the 30-year-old internet catchphrase sensation, is making a TikTok at a Hilton Garden Inn in the Financial District.
“Divas, how does big mama look?” she asks in one of four videos posted from inside her hotel room.
I’m waiting for her downstairs in the not entirely pleasant-smelling lobby, which feels about as far from the fashion fabulousness as you could imagine while still being in Manhattan. It’s Lebron’s first time at NYFW, and her team appeared to have erred on the side of budget-consciousness. The lobby is empty but for a few paunchy guys visiting on what must be stingy corporate expense accounts and one morose-looking woman sitting alone in front of a glass of white wine.
If it all reeks a bit of dreams deferred, or maybe given up on, know that Lebron is finally getting what she always knew she deserved. It was just a month ago, in early August, that she went spectacularly, inexplicably viral thanks to a TikTok she made while sitting in her car outside her job at the supermarket chain Mariano’s in Chicago. “Do you see how I do my makeup for work?” she sassed at the camera, twirling her wig. “Very demure, very mindful.” Since then, the video has been viewed over 51 million times and everyone from Jennifer Lopez and Lindsay Lohan to NASA has also posted about being “very demure, very mindful.” Even the White House joined in: “Canceling the student debt of nearly 5 million Americans through various actions. Very mindful. Very demure,” read an Instagram caption under a photograph of Joe Biden at the Resolute Desk. Thanks to Lebron, Brat Summer abruptly gave way to Demure Girl Fall.
Her managers arrive in the lobby and tell me to give her a few more minutes. She’s finishing straightening her hair.
Eventually, Lebron saunters off the elevator, all dolled up for the party we’ve been invited to, in a body-hugging crushed-velvet dress (from Cardi B’s collab with Fashion Nova, according to one of the managers) and Crocs with socks (Lebron’s idea: “I didn’t get my toes done”). As soon as I meet her, she plops a portable fan on the table in front of us, meaning the whole time we’re talking, her long blonde wig is fluttering around her face, as if she’s Maya Rudolph playing Beyoncé in an SNL sketch. “I refuse to be hot,” she says. “Why would I want to be hot?” Lebron punctuates most of her sentences with “diva” or “fierce” or “please” or “lit-er-all-y” or a big, hearty, head-turning cackle. She is hilarious, if never that bawdy, with Drag Race–worthy comedic timing (RuPaul was clearly tickled when he interviewed her while filling in for Jimmy Kimmel last month). Just this morning, she got a call to make an appearance on Good Morning America. Tomorrow, she’ll be on set making sponcon for Zillow.
Lebron had been posting beauty content for years and already had 800K followers before blowing up (she now has 2.2 million). She didn’t realize just exactly how popular the video was until a week later, on a family vacation to Las Vegas. She had just taken a seat at a Cirque du Soleil show, when, she says, an emcee announced the presence of a “special guest” in the audience, her. Later that night, having learned she was in town, a gay nightclub invited her to come host, and when she arrived, there was a line of people waiting to meet her.
“People act like you’re not supposed to like it,” Lebron tells me, rhythmically clicking her long pink acrylic nails against one another. “But I wouldn’t have wanted this if I didn’t like that.”
Lebron grew up in Chicago in what she tells me was a “big super-loud, super-dramatic Puerto Rican family.” They were “weirdly nonjudgmental of me but also weirdly protective over me: ‘No one else can make fun of you. Only we can make fun of you.’” When, as a freshman in high school, she started presenting as more feminine — previously, she says, she was giving “Fat Joe vibes” — and got “jumped” by some kids at school, her mother moved her to the suburbs.
After high school, she went to beauty school but didn’t want to “deal with people’s complaints” (“Not that I had any”). Before the grocery store, she worked as a server (at Texas Roadhouse, LongHorn Steakhouse, and Buffalo Wild Wings). It wasn’t always easy. “As a plus-size trans woman, not everybody clocks your tea immediately,” she tells me. “But the ones that do, they’ll go out of the way to make you feel very bad about yourself.”
She always knew that she could, and probably should, be famous. As a teenager, she applied to audition on reality-television shows, like MTV’s Room Raiders and The World’s Strictest Parents. She started posting on YouTube in 2013, before moving over to Instagram and TikTok. For the most part, she posted makeup tutorials and videos involving her impressively large collection of Bratz and American Girl dolls. (She claims Bratz once hired and never paid her to make content; Bratz did, however, recently post a demure caption.) Remember the Dunkin’ Donuts bagel oozing with cream cheese, a.k.a. “begussy”? That was Lebron in 2022. She tells me she’s been using the word demure on TikTok for a while; for whatever reason, it just now caught on. “Sometimes I get a word fixation,” she tells me, adding that she was inspired by an interview Venus Extravaganza gives in Paris Is Burning.
In 2023, however — notably, the year of the anti-trans Bud Light influencer backlash — she says she began struggling with the “monetization” of her social-media presence and losing followers. This April, she was forced to get “a regular job.” Then this hit.
Asked why she thinks the video took off in the way it did, she tells me, “I think people are just tired of people being assholes.” She imagines people find it funny to listen to her give a lecture about being “demure” considering she thinks she “looks like a stripper” (She used to wear a black wig, and RuPaul, she says, advised her to stay blonde. “Mother has spoken.”) Her manager chimes in: “I think it was something lighthearted that anyone could do.” It is certainly a more family-friendly internet trend than this summer’s other viral catchphrase, “Hawk Tuah.”
With “demure,” the brand deals and sponsorships (Lenovo laptops, OGX conditioner, MAC concealer, Zillow) spigot was turned back on. Once she realized she was having her moment in Vegas, she didn’t even go back to Chicago. She flew to New York, then L.A., then back to New York, then back to L.A., she says, doing gigs. “Next club! Bus! Another club,” she cracks, quoting a video of Lady Gaga. “Lit-er-all-y.”
Next month, she’s taking her family to Puerto Rico on Airbnb’s dime. And she can now afford to continue her transition and is planning on buying a new car (a 2024 Grand Jeep Cherokee) and moving to an apartment overlooking Lake Michigan with her best friend. She seems unbothered about fending off all the clout chasers. “I’ve had some guys, super-hot thirst-trap dudes, be like, ‘Oh, we should make a video,’” she tells me, when I ask about her dating life. “I think they think, like, ‘Oh well, you’re trans and fat, you should want this.’ I’m like, ‘Oh girl, but I’m also hot, why would I want that? Please.’”
Now she wants to break into more “traditional media,” adding that she imagines she could be “a Laverne Cox vibe for the Latino community.” In the meantime, she’s currently in the middle of a trademarking battle after a man in Washington State trademarked “very demure, very mindful” before she thought to. She has filed her own claim to the U.S. Trademark and Patent Office and recently told her followers what she told me: “We’ve got it handled. Now we’re gonna leave it at that.”
Tonight, she has just arrived in the city from a “brand trip” to the beach hosted by Sephora. She had a good time, she says, but was disappointed to discover DoorDash wasn’t available on Shelter Island. “I’ve never seen that in my life. Oh, diva, this is how I go out.”
But now it’s time for us to actually go out. The invite for tonight is like a game of NYFW Mad-Libs: There is a host (Nylon magazine), another celebrity host who will actually encourage people to attend (Paris Hilton), and quite a few sponsors (Paris Hilton Fragrances, Absolut, Motorola, and Sally Hansen). When we arrive, shortly after 11 o’clock, Lebron is swarmed by paparazzi almost immediately after we exit our Uber. “We are so happy to see you today,” screams one. “You’re an icon! You’re a legend! You’re the most famous person here!” Lebron works it for the camera, crooning, “I love you, New York!”
Inside the Hall des Lumieres, the party is filled with drunk, stumbling young things and TMZ-worthy celebrities — among them Megan Thee Stallion, Tiffany Haddish, and Hilton’s mother and sister, Kathy and Nicky — but Lebron is the center of attention wherever she goes, even the restroom, where she takes a brief break in a stall to “double fist” her weed pen.
“Can I take a selfie with you?” squeals a gaggle of white girls.
“You’re Miss Demure, right? Oh my God. Can I get a selfie with you? Yas!” says a gaggle of gays.
Then another group of white girls: “You’re an icon! You’re a legend!”
And another group of gays: “I literally stan so hard. I stan you more than anything in the entire world! I’m dead. You’re everything!”
“It feels like I’m in the Lizzie McGuire movie,” Lebron tells me, still holding the fan in front of her face and fulfilling every request to say “Very demure, very mindful” for someone else’s account.
Even when Paris Hilton takes the stage in a sparkly pink mini-dress — “I love you, New York!” she screams — to sing “Stars Are Blind,” the iPhone cameras at the back of the room are trained on Jools. People spill drinks on her. Some accidentally pull her wig (I notice her iPhone case reads “Don’t Touch Me”). “It’s been overwhelming because, like, I had a normal job a couple weeks ago,” I overhear her tell one fan.
It is so unpleasantly chaotic — okay, fine, maybe I also snuck a few hits of my weed pen in an attempt to chill out — I can’t help but pitch in, fetching her water when she needs one, shepherding her through the crowd, and, along with her two managers, one of whom was pregnant, acting as a human shield when she eventually tires of taking selfies. I have, more than most people, spent a lot of time at parties with niche and not-so-niche internet celebrities. I have never, however, witnessed a frenzy like that that surrounded Lebron. Nor have I ever seen someone handle the attention so … demurely. “You’ve got the star tonight; you get to see someone living their dreams,” one of her managers tells me.
Eventually, barely an hour into the party, Lebron decides she’s had enough, but she still obliges every request for a selfie on the way out the door because, she says, she doesn’t want to be “mean.” “That was scary. Scary,” she tells me in the car. Back in her hotel room, she’s planning on finally hitting up DoorDash. “I’m going to get a burger, cut it into four pieces, then eat all four pieces.”
“I live in a world of delusion,” she tells me. “When I was a little kid, I remember not knowing what trans people were. I remember I was like, One day, I’m going to be a girl, I’m not sure how, but I’m gonna. I guess because that happened, I was like, Well, one day, I’m going to be a superstar, I know it. I don’t know how, but I know it.”
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