By now you might be familiar with Enza Khoury. To find the first cover star of i-D’s “The Unknown Issue” issue, we scoured the United States for a teenager who uniquely embodies America today. There was a casting call from Jennifer Venditti, 800 applicants, five rounds of callbacks, and one cover star. From this search emerged a secondary project: a look into the psyche of the modern American teen girl. Over the past months, working around school schedules, dance rehearsal, and spring break, I talked with the eight finalists—each of whom could be a cover star in her own right—and I wouldn’t bet against it.
Eighteen-year-old Ari Villavicencio recorded her audition video from her bus stop. Legs dangling off the bench, she looked into the camera: “I know I don’t fit the traditional beauty standard that America has. I’m not tall—I’m actually 4’11—I might not be blonde or skinny or white, but that’s okay because I’m beautiful and I love myself. So here’s me taking my shot!” She was waiting for the bus to take her to the community college she attends in California, though currently she’s working to transfer to FIT. Her idol is Tyler, the Creator. Once, she met him and told him that she’d work with him one day. In her Notes app, she keeps a memo titled “If Ari isn’t feeling motivated.” She read them aloud to me: “Remember that my mom and my dad immigrated here for a better life. Remember that I promised Tyler, the Creator I would work with him one day.” She paused, blushing, hesitant to read the last one: “I need to be better than anyone who has ever wronged me. Hey, my bad! The last one was written on July 5th at 3 a.m. Maybe I was going through it…” Ari also designs for her own brand called Arigato (Ari + the Spanish word for cat = Thank you in Japanese).
One day she wants to live in New York, in a studio apartment with a really big window, and work on her brand. Ari has worked at her school cafeteria, tutored, babysat, and sold clothes on Depop. “I was working at this bakery, and one day as I was putting a cheese roll in a box, I thought: I want to do more than this.” That was the week she saw the casting call. Magazines, she feels, should highlight people’s stories. If she could put anyone on a cover, it would be her mom, a preschool teacher’s assistant for special needs kids—one of the best people she knows.
Like Ari, fifteen-year-old Olivia Dang also said she’d put her parents on a magazine cover. Her mom owns a restaurant in South Carolina; her father is a nail technician. Currently Olivia is playing a windmill in her school play The Quilters, an all-female play about prairie life. The school brings in a woman called “Miss P” once a week to share stories of her own life on the prairie. The windmill, Olivia tells me, connects so many people. She is one of two windmills.
Olivia could see herself becoming a dancer, a musician (she plays the trombone), an actress, or an architect—but college isn’t yet on her mind. “In my twenties,” she told me thoughtfully, “I’d like to be living in North Carolina. As much as I love South Carolina, it doesn’t have everything I’m looking for.” The coolest people she knows are in her district: a nearby saxophone player and a girl in the grade above who played trombone once at Carnegie Hall. Right now, Olivia is experimenting with her personal style, “I’m turning sixteen this year, which means growing up and maturing. I think being a girl means figuring out who I am and what I like about myself and the world.” She rattles off a list: “I like how I’ve been expressing myself through jewelry. I love my jewelry stack right now! Like this simple stud in my helix. I like these new glasses—I was wearing round ones before. I like what I’m doing with my hair. I think short hair suits me!” And what she likes about her personality? “I’m more true to how I see myself. I can be outgoing —maybe a little much—but I’ve given myself more freedom. I think I’m friendly and a good friend!” Being a teenager is hard, she tells me, because you’re surrounded by other teenagers.
That essential friction—between how you see yourself and how the world sees you—occupied the thoughts of every girl I spoke to. Coming of age is that moment when awareness descends on you like an itchy wool sweater. How do you move around it? Can you just take it off?
Seventeen-year-old Catalina Laje has a mantra written on her bedroom wall in suburban Maryland: I don’t have blue hair. She explains this way: just because someone says your hair is blue, thinks something about you, doesn’t mean that it’s true. Her sisters—ages 20 and 23, both live in New York—are her best friends. Her middle sister, Catalina says, is a Stubs member, got a 96% accuracy on her Oscars prediction, AND always carries around her video camera. “Everything that’s cool about me is because they were cool before me,” she marvels.
Since 2016, Catalina has been an outspoken feminist at her conservative school. “I’ve always considered myself to be a little dumb because of my learning disabilities,” she says, but I took AP Gov this year and I’ve never done better in a class!” With her flower-child energy—silver hoops, plenty of rings—Catalina adores California. Pasadena is one of her favorite places, and she’d love to help rebuild there. She listens to music and has smells that correlate with each season. Right now, it’s David Bowie and Linda Rohnstadt, warm cashmere, musky florals. She was recently waitlisted at her top choice college and is unsure what to do. Her ultimate dream? (“Always voice your dreams because you’ll never know who hears them.”) To star in a teen drama. Of her future she told me, “I’d still be friends with my best friends. I’d love to be friends with someone like Devon Lee Carlson. If I can just sit on a balcony and watch the wind, I’ll probably be more peaceful than if I was going out every night.” She paused.“But I will be going out! And I’d own some sort of store. I’m a big dreamer—but I also firmly believe that I can do it.”
Catalina wasn’t the only one who credited her older sisters for her cool factor. Victoria Altamirano from Illinois tells me, in her verging on mid-Atlantic accent, that, “My siblings built me up to be a witty, intelligent girl.” Art is essential to Victoria’s life. Every day, the eighteen-year-old practices guitar, writes, or draws. She’s inspired by artists like Frida Kahlo or Henry Darger: “Being a child is one thing everyone can relate to. There’s a certain level of feeling so small and helpless, but also hopeful, unburdened. I’ve had enough of the grayscale, minimalist, modern-day snooze-fest. We should live in a world where we take the time to create something that reflects who we are, things like Gothic revival architecture and intricate jewelry that tells a story.” Though she often feels inadequate, she’s decided not to give in. “I have borne witness to women who are filled with ‘what ifs,’ and I will not be one of them.” She wants to go to University Art of London, but financially doesn’t feel like it’s in the cards. Now her goal is the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. And she likes Chicago. Her family’s there. She bikes to her favorite bakery and visits the record store where her sister works. In the future, she’ll still be making art, with a “beautiful closet, a beautiful jewelry collection, and a kitty.” Mostly, “I want to be at peace with myself. It’s okay if all my dreams don’t come true by then. I have time.” After our call, she emailed me the following list:
Things I love: magazines, my dog, music (Amy Winehouse, Pulp, Pretty Sick), laughing, Damon Albarn from Blur, the way things at night scare me just a little more than usual.
Things I dislike: AI, people who can’t carry conversation, olives & mushrooms, ugly people with big egos (lol), hangnails, feeling rushed, people who take things too seriously (even worse when they’re right).
Speaking to these girls, I noticed the specter of feasibility. Some felt free to try anything; others understood that certain paths are harder.
Katherina Mandia is a freshman in college on the biomedical track. When we spoke, she was on spring break, an hour and a half from campus. “The only thing to do in the Midwest is bowling or boba,” she jokes. Before Michigan, she lived in Tokyo for thirteen years. Her parents, originally from India, moved for work and then relocated to the Midwest so that Katherina could access higher education more easily. A biomedical degree from Tokyo wouldn’t translate elsewhere. Since she went to high school in Michigan, she qualifies for in-state tuition.
Besides biomed Katherina wants to act, like her favorite, Shefali Shah. “That’s if I’m being a dreamer… If I’m being a realist, I want a degree—something to fall back on—then pursue my passion.” She takes a breath. “But if I get to dream, I’m going to dream big. I want to make indie films with unconventional plots. I’m into artists obsessed with their art. I’d travel, support my parents, and be financially stable, maybe more than my peers.” I ask her if she believes in manifestation. She sighs. “These tarot cards on my TikTok are not working! They keep saying I’m going to move.” Shyly, she tells me that she stalked my Instagram before we talked and that it’s super aesthetic. This is a huge compliment.
Style has always been important to teenage girls—it’s one of the easiest ways to test the boundaries of self-expression. On the weekends, Cheyenne Anderson from New Mexico sells thrifted clothes out of the back of her car— denim skirts, funky tops. “My market is the 13-year-old rebellious girl out on the town. You know, what would her mom not let her buy?” she explains. She has perfectly straight red hair and an enormous cross around her neck, part aesthetic, part cultural; in all things Cheyenne is inspired by her Chicana, Mexica and Apache heritage. Currently, she lives in a home that her grandfather built. “New Mexico is the land of entrapment. Everybody leaves—but they come back. I need to see the world before I decide if I want to return.” In the future she dreams of working in the MET archive or going into curation. A junior in high school, she recently curated her first show with La Plazita Institute, a center that works to rehabilitate formerly incarcerated individuals. Her show exhibited the artwork of inmates and detained teens alongside that of local artists. In 2024 Cheyenne was honored as a “Leading Change Honoree” for her work making art more accessible by Jill Biden. This past election she just missed voting age. “But my opinions are still valid. What’s the point of all this money for guns and the military if we can’t feed our own communities!” She’s positive though about Generation Alpha, “They’re going to be the most tech savvy, maybe a little less socially advanced, but full of ideas!”
Daisy Shelton, from New York, is similarly optimistic, “We’re in a bad way as a society, but I’m hopeful. I think people are good.” She’s eighteen, with shaggy blonde hair and a mischievous smile. She likes rock climbing at Harriman State Park, Dungeons and Dragons, and is a total metal head. She has a girlfriend, who she says is “fucking awesome.” Daisy is on a post-high school gap year and works at a local guitar store. Every inch of her walls are covered in treasured knick-nacks. A large plank of wood floats over a door frame next to antler horns she found in the trash. Her friends are mostly anti-social media.
In 2022, The New York Times published a piece on the Luddite Club, a group of cellphone free teenagers who gather to read and create art. Daisy was briefly in a satellite Luddite Club.“Coming out of Covid, I spent too much time on my phone. It was all just droning,” she says. “I’m super anti-capitalism. It feels very sinister. I like the way my brain feels when it’s not online.” One day, she wants to own a plot of land upstate, learn a trade, and live part-time in the woods. On being a girl right now? She grins. “It’s pretty awful and really fucking cool. It’s cool because it’s complicated.”
Jade Chloe also grew up in New York City. As a student at one of the city’s most prestigious performing arts high schools, she has grueling days: 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. academic classes followed by dance at Alvin Ailey from 2 to 4:20 p.m., then another dance program from 5 to 8:30. She voices a sentiment every New Yorker knows well: “Living in New York, there’s an overproductive hustle culture that makes it difficult to relax. If I take a break, what am I losing momentum in?” But leaving New York, which she contemplated when applying to colleges, would also feel like a betrayal. “I think going away would feel like I’m abandoning the community a little bit.”
Jade is a delegate member for the NAACP. What does she think of our current political situation? “Eric Adams? Oh, he needs to leave. I know there’s some deal going on with him and the Trump administration for a pardon. It seems like he no longer wants to make New York a sanctuary city. He should be in jail.” Then she looks at me with a glint in her eye. “Is it okay if I ask you a couple questions?” I nod. Immediately, she launched into a second interview that was basically the length of our first: “How long have you been doing this? Where were you before? Did you go to college? Are you able to say what the other girls are like? Also, where’d you get that hat?”
Answers: a month, not sure, yes, no, Depop. She smiled, satisfied. I saw myself briefly through her eyes. At seventeen a girl might wonder, “Is this who I am?” A 26-year-old, someone who exists in that purgatory of adulthood between total self-exploration and the reputability of middle-age, should have life figured out. But in my rudimentary pursuit of the subject you never really stop feeling that way. That “Is this who I am?” is actually who you are, and will be preserved inside you always as a perfect snow globe of your teenage life: There are my middle aged parents. There is my house. There is my best friend. There is the store where I go thrifting on the weekends. There is my crush. There are my worries, am I enough or too much? Am I smart? Am I pretty? Can I succeed? As we get older most of us possess farsighted nostalgia, the recent past is a haze until suddenly you wake up and that recent past isn’t so recent. But that just happened. I was just 21. I was just in high school. My parents aren’t that old. As I talked to these girls I found myself staring out the big window in my small New York apartment, suddenly feeling how luxurious it was. I wanted to call my mom.
During one of the interviews Olivia asked me if I got a chance to talk to people like her a lot. Did she mean teenagers? She nodded. Honestly, I didn’t—but through this project, I talked with some of the most curious, lovely, and funny humans I’ve had the good fortune to meet. They spoke about other girls with respect and adoration (“She’s a total character” or “She’s really kind”). They were politically engaged and totally self-possessed, even if they didn’t realize it yet. So many of them felt nervous or questioned their abilities, but think of how much courage it takes to just put yourself out there—to be heard and to share dreams. Recalling something Cheyenne said about the Gen Alpha kids she volunteers with: “A lot of times they get ignored, but if you take a moment and listen to them, they’re some of the smartest people ever.”