All Eyes Are on JoJo Siwa

What’s JoJo Siwa up to? As usual, she’s getting mobbed. Hustling photographers and amused internet posters swarm her on a Manhattan helipad — “JoJo! JoJo!” — a thicket of outstretched arms blocking her path. She totters forward a few inches and poses, flashing her megawatt veneers ($50 grand, if you’re wondering) for the cameras. “Is it heavy?” one reporter yells, inquiring about her outfit. “Not heavy,” she replies. “But dear God, if I fall.” A few wrong steps and Siwa, trapped inside a furry ball, could roll right off the landing pad and into the East River.

Her rotund black getup is the brainchild of British designer Christian Cowan, whose outdoor New York Fashion Week show she’s attending alongside more sober-minded models, influencers, and industry professionals. (In an email, Cowan called Siwa “the ultimate fashion punk” and stated that “the fur ball dress is one of the most surprising and subversive dresses I’ve ever done.”) This is Siwa’s first event of her first NYFW, and as much as the crowd is there to see Cowan’s spring 2025 collection, she brought the real show. Her legs roam free, covered by fuzzy knee-high, Grinch-colored monster boots that elevate her to NBA-player height. Her hair — dyed Golden Chocolate Creme Oreo–style in sandwiched blonde and brown layers — has been sculpted into long, bubble-braid ropes. One spurts from the top of her head, like a mini unicorn horn. Her face is a green glitter explosion. “Yes, JoJo, icon!” one onlooker hollers.

“I don’t want people to look at me and go, Oh wow, she looks really beautiful tonight,” Siwa notified me on the drive to the show from her hotel, ball free. Her publicist, former Wilhelmina Models CEO Bill Wackermann, had tried to shove the spherical garment into the SUV’s backseat with her but failed. As he lifted it to the trunk, a few spectators in Times Square shouted her name, phone cameras ready.

She continued, “I want them to look at me and be like, The fuck is she wearing?”

Photo: Adela Loconte/Shutterstock

“The fuck is she wearing” is a common reaction to Siwa. Just a few years ago, she was a rainbows-and-kittens tween idol, the personification of a Claire’s store. Her giant signature hair bows caused such a ruckus among kids that several U.K. schools banned them for being a distraction, causing one angry parent to accuse them of “treating bows like guns.” She has been performing for almost her entire life, rising to fame as a child contestant on the reality shows Abby’s Ultimate Dance Competition and Dance Moms. In 2020, Time magazine named her one of the world’s 100 most influential people. Kim Kardashian, whose daughter North is a fan, wrote the endorsement: “JoJo Siwa is a ray of sunshine in a world that seems scary right now.” The following year, she came out as gay, becoming a rare out-and-proud queer girl in the sanitized world of children’s entertainment and something of an LGBTQ+ icon.

These days, though, Siwa has cast herself as a thunderous cloud storming the golden lands of sapphic pop. In April, she unveiled a provocative rebrand in the style of Bangerz-era Miley Cyrus, dropping jaws in head-to-toe Kiss cosplay at the iHeartRadio awards. Then she released the wild-child single “Karma” with a music video look that imagines, What if Gene Simmons were an amphibian? The video’s storyline is somewhat baffling: Siwa is shipwrecked on a remote island and flashes back to better days traveling with … a polyamorous acrobatic troupe? She humps the ground wearing combat boots and boasts that she’s a “bad girl” who does “bad things,” albeit one who still says “effed” instead of “fucked.” (“It rhymes a little better,” she explains to me.) “Karma” garnered over 5 million views in its first day; the choreography, a spasm of stomps and arm motions, went viral. Critics accused her of being cringey and overly sexual, but she has continued to court controversy, miming masturbation at Pride parades and getting booed. “Everyone’s like, ‘Don’t you want the reaction to be positive?’” Siwa said. “And I’m like, ‘No, that was never the goal.’”

Right now, she produces art for people to take the piss out of, a Marcel Duchamp for the MrBeast generation. For tonight’s show, Cowan had proposed a different outfit, a sleek black suit with cutouts and a star button. The problem was that “it was too cool,” Siwa explained in the SUV, whereas the ball would inspire Halloween costumes. “People are reading the book, and as they’re reading it, I’m writing the next page, right? And that’s the page of my career, whatever it is that I’m building. I feel like this keeps it going, versus toning it down. I’d rather keep it open, a little psycho.”

I get the overwhelming sense that Siwa feels a duty to give everyone who encounters her a good story. When she appeared on the Call Her Daddy podcast to promote the “Karma” release in April, she said offhandedly, “I gave up my life, essentially, for the world.” The obligation to entertain extends to me, the stranger tagging along, for whom she whips up a tempest of quotables and ridiculous moments, never denying a question or turning off. Mere minutes after I met her, she whipped out her phone and started filming TikToks in front of me — throwing up signs, hollering, sticking her tongue out — then dismissed them for minor flaws. (Siwa runs her social-media accounts alone; on Call Her Daddy, she said the biggest misconception is that “I have somebody telling me what to do at every level.”) She is never not thinking about content. “I’m holding my phone in here getting video because it’s way too funny,” she chipperly alerted Wackermann and me while teetering to the helipad, attempting to film a TikTok from inside the fur ball. Though she’ll down Fireball onstage or get sloshed on 18 drinks for her 21st birthday, she lives a mostly sober life: “I drink to entertain.”

Inside the perimeters of the fashion show, she has Wackermann record a TikTok from the outside as she looks up and down inside her ball, where she is also recording. “You’re ready for the ball POV?” she shouts to the camera, cackling and widening her eyes. “This is psycho!” The Fashion Week crowd snaps photos of her, pausing for the ten minutes of Cowan’s murder-mystery-themed show, which Siwa watches rapt, standing behind them. (She cannot sit in her outfit.)

Then it’s go time again. All through the night, Siwa never flags and is quick to be in on the joke. “Hey, JoJo, how’s it going?” “Feeling a little ballsy!” she replies. “Can we touch her …” a pair of girls asks, motioning toward her fuzzy outfit. “Touch her balls?!” Siwa heckles. She’s like Mickey Mouse at Disney World, answering every photo demand with an “ABSOLUTELY!” Her one request is to say hi to Kristin Chenoweth: “I about shit my balls when I saw her.” She poses with TikTokkers Dylan Mulvaney and Aliyah’s Interlude, plus some of the show’s models, who scream “Karma” lyrics to her. She tells reporters she’s rooting for her friend Ezra Sosa and Anna Delvey on Dancing With the Stars. “I love how you start smiling and 42 people just appear,” Siwa observes.

I ask Siwa if she ever found her fame stressful, thinking about Chappell Roan, who has expressed overwhelm at the relentless fan demand for photos. “It’s all I know. So it’s like, yeah, I’m in for it!” she replies, not quite answering the question. Earlier that day, Siwa told me, she was biking around Central Park wearing nothing crazy, just an NYPD shirt. Fans were beckoning her left and right. After she leaves the show, she’ll postgame at Olive Garden with a close friend for kids’ pasta and breadsticks, where she’ll be approached by all the workers and then a sheepish manager apologizing for the workers approaching her. This comes with the territory, she says: “People are usually very nice, and if they’re not, they’re still being entertained, and they still know who I am and they still want to take a picture.”

“Isn’t this great?” Wackermann mentions to me. He’s been in this business for a long time, he says, and there’s no one quite like her. Even though it has been time to go for at least five minutes now, Siwa is still getting intercepted. “She’s the CEO of the attention economy,” he says, beaming.