This story appears in i-D 374, The Unknown Issue. Get yours now.
written by NICOLAIA RIPS
photography WALKER BUNTING
styling CAROLINA ORRICO
Kim Kardashian, glassy-eyed, crawling on all fours in the music video for her Calabasas-meets–Florida Project edition of “Santa Baby”—every few wiggles, her substantial tush pops up above her wig and her shins shiver. Addison Rae, speeding backwards on the flatbed of a pickup truck in the video for Arca’s “Aquamarine” remix. Lady Gaga, smashing her toes into her own face in the video for “Disease.” All moments that raised the internet in legion. All are the alchemical medley of highbrow, lowbrow, Martha Graham–meets–TikTok dance, Bob Fosse, and reality TV—the fingerprint of 23-year-old dancer and movement director Lexee Smith.
The first time I met Lexee, it was past midnight at a hotel bar in downtown Manhattan. I tagged along with our mutual friend Morgan Maher for a drink and we ended up buzzing cosmos until 3 a.m. I came away from the night with a variety of thoughtful impressions: Lexee, pert on a plush red couch, was radiant and magnanimous, possessing a girl-next-door star quality both vaguely vintage and very Zoomer. A number of questions cropped up that night, which I’ve been stewing on since—questions only a woman typifying the internet’s distinct brand of womanhood can answer, Zooming in from LA.
“We danced our tits off,” she starts telling me, with a Southern lilt, about a recent night out. Lexee was born in Texas, where she started dancing at 4 years old in the studio of her mom’s best friend, before moving to LA, aged 12. That South-meets-West blend emerges in her speech and interests— habitually Valley Girl with a Southern spirit, speaking in long breathless sentences. “My biggest form of leisure and peace is getting my nails done on Ventura Place, then maybe walking down Ventura for miles and maybe going to Erewhon or getting a new book or maybe going to an antique mall in Sherman Oaks,” she says at warp speed. “But I also have this hopeless-romantic thing that comes from—damn, what would my life have been if I lived this small-town fantasy? Had a little man with a pickup truck, and that chaotic, toxic, Southern love.” Her coming-of-age revolved entirely around the LA dance community, with most of her friends also dancers racing through studios, recording and uploading choreography online, most of which still sits on their feeds, several hundred posts deep.
Then, Lexee met Addison Rae, and Addison met Lexee, and both lives, and the lives of girls all over the internet, irrevocably shifted.
Their meeting was an encounter Lexee describes inconsequentially, as if it isn’t important how, just that they did and were going to have met at some point because of their transcendental synergy. “It just feels like she is my mirror,” she says, her eyes fixed. Addison echoes the sentiment, telling me, “Lexee is the kind of girl you dream about being best friends with when you’re little. She’s a secret keeper. She’s the subject and she’s the painter. She’s really real.” In videos of themselves experimenting in the dance studio, it’s often difficult to tell who’s who, which limb belongs to which woman, and whose hair is thrashing like 2002 Britney. “I don’t know what the fuck our relationship was in past lives but . . .” Lexee trails off. “It’s the wildest thing. We’re the most passionate girls when it comes to really wanting to do something great and leaving a little thumbprint on this time culturally.”
Addison has since become one of the genre-defining pop stars of our time, with the same mercurial quality as Lexee’s other superstar partners. On her ascent into internet stardom, she’s assembled a glamourous super-group of collaborators: former Rihanna stylist and Interview magazine Editor-in-Chief Mel Ottenberg; the magazine’s mononymous fashion director, Dara; and, of course, Lexee (her “official” title is creative consultant, as well as movement director).
Addison and Lexee are canny architects of their own image, understanding what makes internet catnip (the answer: staging paparazzi photos, pumping petrol in a snapback and apron). Lexee ruminates on their knack for nailing deliciously scroll-stopping pap shots, among other things. “It’s like we’ve been in this guinea pig land,” Lexee says, “trying to understand what this all really means, and now it feels like we know what to do with this world. It’s really special.”
Bona fides aside (Lexee also has more than 700,000 followers across social media, and collaborations with Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish, and FKA twigs under her belt), it always feels like Lexee and Addison are having fun, calling the paparazzi on themselves and filming videos in Y2K-inflected, consciously chaotic outfits (Brandy Melville–coded with faux fur and a baker boy cap). Their digital presence feels like peering into a middle-school sleepover of two best friends, in hysterics because the world seems so doable and they’re giddy in their ability to reimagine it. They enjoy being beautiful, talented, and young, and why shouldn’t they? Lexee tells me, “I think we share that feeling when we watch certain pioneers and pop girlies, you know—the Madonnas, the Marilyns. It feels shimmery to the body.” What she describes is the magic of self-creation—the kind of magic that emerges when somebody is doing something beautiful, glamourous, and exciting. “We just chase that feeling constantly with each other, and want to be the women who do that to other girls later down the line.”
Lexee’s other great loves: Bettie Page. Dita Von Teese. Faye Dunaway. Tammy Wynette and Nancy Sinatra. The women of Sex and the City (she’s a Carrie sun, Samantha rising, driving her taste for drinking cosmos. “I love that self-sabotage for the sake of inspiration”). To her, these women know how to orchestrate the public eye perfectly. “It’s almost a little bit scary because they’ve learned how to use their womanly tools to pull the world’s puppet strings. They’re using their pure femininity to make everyone fall in love, which is just the best thing ever, to me.” She finishes her sentence and pulls out a pair of Mickey Mouse ears from who knows where, and puts them on her head.
For the past two years, the girl economy has netted unprecedented returns. The idea of returning to the accoutrement of adolescence (bows and Mary Janes, Sonny Angels and Barbie) along with a rejection of responsibility (“I’m just a girl”) is the complicated combination of seemingly opposing ideologies—a chimera created from the joys of reclaiming girlhood, while also a submission to our culture’s impulse to infantilise women. It is no secret that celebrities are getting thinner and younger-looking (we’re entering the era of Ozempic and undetectable facelifts—masterful work that’s left celebrities like Christina Aguilera, Lindsay Lohan, and Donatella Versace looking years younger).
In Lexee’s work, womanliness is a tool for self-creation, just as it was for her idols. It’s as essential to her practice as the heels she wears, or the tights she cuts the waistbands off of to let her torso roll freely. You see it in the videos of her dancing—her movements are primal, strange, sexy, and completely fearless. A recent video, racking up 20,000 likes, has her and Addison creating a strange spiderlike being with their legs and hips. “Somebody’s gotta be, like, pussy out. But only because I want to do what I want to do . . . and I don’t want to be ashamed of these weird, kinked-up feelings I have.” Recently she’s been thinking about her “arm dysmorphia” (I admit I have the same thing—rise up, fellow women who feel weird about their arms), and has been experimenting with body paint as arm cuffs. “Maybe I’ll make that a thing, Michèle Lamy style, and create a weird illusion. Maybe this can be my arm dysmorphia signature.”
When asked about the future of her career, Lexee refers to the golden light of alignment, a concept that comes up frequently as we talk. It’s a shimmery feeling, a circular rightness. When Lexee makes choices that feel correct, she is in that golden light of alignment, and more opportunities that are correct then present themselves. As she moves within this golden alignment, following those shimmery feelings, people she’s admired her entire life will suddenly reach out—women she calls “the most powerful women in pop culture.” Her dream is to work with “all of our pioneer deity women” (Kim and Gaga, and even more deities yet to be sanctified, though she won’t name them).
As we speak, I am struck by her unwavering vision. Her Instagram bio, as I first sat down to write this, was the confident cliffhanger “I’ve decided.” What have you decided? Tell me! As I finish, it’s been updated: “Everythingggggggggggggggggggggggg.”
She has the same birthday as Dr. Seuss, inspired by his instantly recognizable world. “What would mine be like,” she muses, wanting to build something as wildly physical and tangible, wanting to “live life and party and have a million boyfriends,” but also be really, really focused. When I ask her which pioneer deity she is manifesting working with next, she demurs. The answer: herself.
hair & makeup CIARA MACCARO USING TOM FORD AT EXCLUSIVE ARTISTS
nails GINGER LOPEZ USING APRÉS AT OPUS BEAUTY
photography assistants BRIGHID BURNES, MEL GORDILLO & BROOKE DODDERIDGE
production THE MORRISON GROUP
production manager CECILIA ALVAREZ BLACKWELL