This story appears in i-D 374, The Unknown Issue. Get yours now.
written by LAKIN IMANI STARLING
photography PETRA COLLINS
styling SPENCER SINGER
JT is only a few minutes late, but she races into a plush WSA conference room in Lower Manhattan, arms wide, wearing a pair of mismatched silver sneakers (one an Asics, one a luxury brand). She’s known for pulling experimental looks, but this styling wasn’t a deliberate choice—it’s a result of her doing her absolute best to arrive on time. “The old me would’ve turned around and went and got my shoe. But now it’s me knowing that, ‘Bitch, somebody else want this just as bad as you,’” she laughs. “It’s a hustle every day. Everybody’s trying to be somebody.”
JT arrived to fame off the back of a 15-month stint in a federal prison. The system had whisked JT away for credit card fraud just two months after the debut of Period, the acclaimed 2018 record released by JT as a part of City Girls. Now, at 32 years old, she’s going it alone, experiencing an astronomical ascent with the success of City Cinderella—her first solo mixtape released last year.
“I’m always going to be an It girl. I’ve been one before I was a rapper—all five mugshots.”
Two weeks into 2025, JT (full name Jatavia Shakara Johnson) is smiling, flashing a new piercing under her glossy top lip. She’s dressed down in a classic white tank and vintage Levi’s, with long jet-black layers framing her face. It’s pared back compared to her usual style, shape-shifting from blonde Versace-clad vixen with teal lips to full black-leather goth. Today she carries a bright energy, credited to a promise made to herself post-prison: to beautify every day, no matter what life throws at her. “I feel so good,” she gleams. “I get up and do everything I need to do for myself before anything. I’m choosing me more than ever.”
In 2023, that promise manifested with her first solo track, “No Bars”—a viral demo of her cocky style (“cold-ass cocky bitch,” she raps) with a major co-sign from Nicki Minaj, credited in the liner notes. That track’s success culminated in an emotional performance during her first solo set at Rolling Loud Miami, sharing second billing with Lil Yachty, Tyga, and Rick Ross, as Future headlined. It had only been a couple of days since JT planned the funeral for her younger brother JR. The tears were a mix of intense and overwhelming grief, but also pride—a profound game-changing moment where JT, and everyone watching, knew she’d nailed her performance.
“I couldn’t really grieve, and in that final fucking moment I was like, ‘Look at you, girl, you a soldier. You ate that and you did it seamlessly.’ I wasn’t missing any steps and didn’t look like what I was going through, and I was going through so much,” she says, not allowing herself to slip into sadness. “‘No Bars’ is the epitome of my personality. When I hear it, I tell myself, ‘Look how far you came off of that song. It ain’t even no pop record. It ain’t no hook. It’s just you being you all the way through and through.’”
Growing up in the Carol City and Liberty City neighborhoods of Miami, JT navigated a series of trials, raised by her father and stepmother while her biological mother was incarcerated. As one of 16 children, JT used her sharp wit to craft raps for herself and siblings in a group her father assembled at home, naming them The Protegees. As a teen, juggling jobs and running credit card scams with a short stint in her local college, music—the thing that would successfully get her out—was always in the picture.
Anxiety has always been a presence in her life, and one she’s extremely open about. “I’m always nervous. I’m always scared,” she reveals. She recognizes how it shows up in the Black community, specifically as a Black woman from Liberty City who has endured and survived what she has. “Hope,” the opening track on City Cinderella, is a raw expression of the aftershock she still experiences following trauma. “I’m still mad from 20 years ago, and I feel like a lot of us are still mad from 20, 10, five years ago about shit that happened to us that we never got a chance to express,” she says.
To make sense of it all, she takes a moment to reflect on the Zora Neale Hurston quote: “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
“I remember having a lot of questions in 2022. That wasn’t a good year for me. That was a year of me trying to find myself and who I am because I spent the beginning of my career in prison. I didn’t have time to get to know my ‘celebrity self,’ then Covid happened, and all types of other shit. I think it was my worst year ever, but now when I look back, it was my best year, too. I asked the universe and God so many questions. In 2023 and 2024, they slowly started answering,” JT explains. “One of my main questions to myself was, ‘Girl, what are you afraid of?’”
Last February, JT slid onto the single “Sideways,” produced by Ben10k, whose credits include tracks with Offset, Ty Dolla $ign, Megan Thee Stallion, GloRilla, Drake … the list goes on. “Sometimes I get offers for stuff and I don’t take them because I’m like, I can’t do this. I’m not able or I’m not worthy or why are they choosing me to do this?” she says. Her laid-back, semi-stank flow made waves online and IRL, though, and JT experienced thousands of fans squeezing into packed venues across the US, chanting the lyrics bar for bar.
Now, amid her anxiety, she chooses to believe she’s deserving of the good and embraces the rewards of leaning into discomfort. “I would never do anything because I feel like it might not work. If you do something, you’ll receive something back, whether it’s good or bad,” she says.
“One of my main questions to myself was, ‘Girl, what are you afraid of?’”
What JT’s receiving back is a whole lot of love from the fashion community, turning heads and cameras with her taste for transformation, sitting front row at Paris Fashion Week (although her anxiety nearly stopped her from attending the Mugler show). JT has always been very much that girl, known for her self-described “alt-pretty” looks—from colorful vintage Dior pieces, styled with silver chain chokers and black curtain bangs, to plush, fuzzy pink head-to-toe Rick Owens (her favorite brand), including bubblegum-colored thigh-high boots covered in fur. She embraces her status as a new fashion fixture.
“I’ve been an It girl,” she claims with a confident smirk. “I’m always going to be an It girl. I’ve been one before I was a rapper—all five mugshots. You can go to my Facebook and Myspace, I’ve always been cool. I’ve never been no lame. I’ve always been popular in my city. It didn’t take for me to fucking bleach my eyebrows to get bitches to realize I’ve been putting them on.”
Being a solo artist means JT has more room to flex her taste and evolve without limits. City Cinderella was a chance for JT to reclaim that freedom after incarceration, and that continues to unfold. She’s currently recording, working on experimental sounds that she describes as “echoey,” and is gearing up to drop her next single, “Ran Out”—a street record that makes her feel like a bad bitch. The growth between each of her creative releases has birthed a much wiser JT, more in tune with her well-being, and actively working to be kinder to herself.
She reminds herself what it was like in the early days before the beautiful car, home, and relationship with Lil Uzi Vert, who she’s been with since 2019. “I feel like I have to strip myself of my reality sometimes to be able to feel like I have nothing to lose.” She often revisits the experience recording Period, when so much was at stake. “I will never forget how I felt at that moment. I was under so much pressure and some days I was up, some days I’d be down. But something so beautiful came from that time. I can never get that feeling back of being free, but also not free,” she reflects. “You just gotta walk through life. I’m still a person of panic and worry, but I’ve been trying to remove that from my routine. Because we all here for a reason,” she says. “It’s not ours, so whatever. Who cares?”
hair TEVIN WASHINGTON USING TRUE INDIAN HAIR AND T3 MICRO
makeup KALI KENNEDY USING MAC COSMETICS AT STREETERS
nails TIANA “TINY” HARDY
set design NICHOLAS DE JARDINS AT STREETERS
lighting director CALLAGHAN CHRISTIE
photography assistant ASHTON HERMAN
fashion assistants JOSH HICKMAN & KIERNAN FRANCIS
makeup assistant NIKO JANE ZUCCHERO
set design assistants KIRK PALSMA & LAURA HUGHES
production THE MORRISON GROUP
production assistant ALEXZANDRIA ASHTON
post production INK
special thanks THE BOWERY HOTEL