written by ROBBY KELLY
photographed by DAVID BRANDON GEETING
styled by IAN BRADLEY
Jay Guapo doesn’t have his driver’s license. Becoming street legal is at the top of his vision board for 2026, he tells me as he floors the gas pedal to the Hot Wheels: Victory Lap simulator inside the Atlantic Terminal Dave & Buster’s arcade. A group of teens, mouths agape, watch from a distance as he thrusts his virtual racecar through an oil spill and around a 360° toy car loop.
“Me and my friends used to come here and just run [Pop-A-Shot] all day,” Guapo explains while weaving through the maze of neon arcade games inside D&B.
Here is a non-complete ranking of the 23-year-old’s arcade skills:
1. Pop-A-Shot: Very good.
2. Break the Plate: Not bad (he’s left-handed).
3. Guitar Hero (“Hole in Earth” by Deftones on Beginner): Pretty bad
4. Dance Dance Revolution (“Alone” by Marshmellow on Beginner): He won’t be on Dancing with the Stars anytime soon.
As Guapo sits down on a large, plastic hippopotamus to test out the life-size Hungry Hungry Hippo game, the group of gawking teens works up the courage to ask for a picture. At 3.4 million followers on TikTok, Guapo is an A-lister among the short-form content generation. Among his fans: teenagers across the continent, as well as Kim Kardashian and North West—the mother-daughter duo dressed up as him for Halloween this year. Guapo, a lanky figure dressed in Rick Owens cargo pants and a cropped long-sleeve t-shirt, slouches for photos as the teens exclaim how long they’ve been following him on TikTok.
Born and raised in the Bronx, Guapo began posting on TikTok in 2022 between shifts scooping ice cream at Häagen-Dazs in New York City. His splattering of lip-sync videos, dances, and skits reached a fever pitch last summer, catapulting him from niche algorithm interest to international star. During a recent trip to Indonesia, after Guapo deplaned to visit Nihi Sumba, a resort on a small island east of Bali, he was immediately recognized by airport security guards who began imitating his viral cardigan dance.
“I was never really that kid who knew who he wanted to be this or that, but I swear to God I knew I was going to become famous.”
Jay Guapo
To those on the low end of average daily screen time, Guapo’s fame sits in the indescribable gray zone of social media influencer whose virality feels like a flash in the pan of the attention economy. But in the months since his summer boom, he began his modelling career in a Marc Jacobs Heaven campaign, walked in Luar’s Spring/Summer 2026 show at New York Fashion Week, spent IRL time with the Kardashians out in Los Angeles, collaborated with streaming megastars like IShowSpeed, rappers Yeat and Central Cee, and has even gotten nods from the older heads in the music industry whose songs he’s helped breathe new viral life into.
A pillar source of Guapo’s virality was born through short clips of him lip-syncing to Lana Del Rey, KE$HA, and other pop music relics while strolling through his everyday life in the Bronx and Brooklyn. The peculiar juxtaposition many see as an ironic bit, playing to a wider audience.
“I used to love when I would be around all my friends, they all look hood, and then I’ll put a white girl song on that just doesn’t fit them,” he says. “There was a point when I was scared of my own music taste, I didn’t want to show people it, but then I just started posting it.”
Guapo mouthing to Lana Del Rey’s unreleased track “Never Let Me Go” is perhaps his most recognizable performance, with dozens upon dozens of variations filmed across the globe, racking up tens of millions of views.
“I saw a clip with an unreleased song, and I was like, ‘Bro, what the fuck?’” he says about discovering the Born to Die singer through TikTok. “And then I just got into Lana Del Rey, and every song I heard was a hit, hit, hit, hit. She’s goated.”
“And then the Clairo thing. . .” Guapo’s train of thought is interrupted as a pair of older teen Dave & Buster’s hostesses introduce themselves. They look over their shoulders, making sure they’re out of eyesight from their manager as they take turns smiling for a photo.
Guapo is calm and inviting when interacting with his fans.“I’ve seen mad famous people, and I would never go up to them,” he says. “So people who come up to me, I’m like, ‘Nah, they got confidence.’”
“I don’t care what people do. I know what I am and how I look. I’m the guy in leggings and I’m making this shit look cool.”
Jay Guapo
Guapo describes his younger self as a shy but attention-seeking individual. He isn’t phased by public recognition and enjoys it when he catches an onlooker trying to sneak an incognito photo of him. He always had a desire for a stage but was unsure where to find one. “I was never really that kid who knew who he wanted to be this or that,” he explains. “But I swear to God I knew I was going to become famous.” If Guapo did have a dream job growing up, it was to be Steve Irwin, the late Australian zookeeper and TV personality. He has a strong love for animals; his dog and two cats are tattooed on his right arm, accompanied by a feral wolf inked on his left (his favorite TV show of all time is Teen Wolf).
“I wanted to be a werewolf so bad when I was young,” he says, amending his shortlist of childhood dreams.
Similar to most people his age, Guapo isn’t exactly sure what he pictures his future career to be. With millions of followers at his fingertips, he hopes to continue seizing on the types of opportunities he never could have pictured himself having a year ago. He’s starting to release his own music and alludes to fashion opportunities after jumping in cold to his first runway gig at Luar.
“I was so shy in life,” he says, looking back on his runway debut just a few months after his TikTok videos started going mainstream. “I thought, yeah, people could judge me. They could think I’m gay. They could think I’m this, that. I don’t care what people do. I know what I am and how I look. I’m the guy in leggings and I’m making this shit look cool.”
Currently, his days revolve around creating content with an uptick in travel (to create more content). For Christmas, he rented a remote cabin in the woods. “We camped like one foot away from the house,” he laughs. “I want to start camping in real places, adventuring more. I want to be able to drive because my dream is to have a nice RV. I don’t want a house and stuff, I want an RV.”
Guapo is cognizant of how the idiosyncrasies within his personality and interests are what draw his followers in. Those who are afraid to share what music they listen to alone in their room. Those who are braggadocious around their friends but wouldn’t dare have the confidence to approach a celebrity in public.
The mid-afternoon crowd at Dave and Buster’s has thinned as Selena Gomez’s “Bad Liar” thumps through the now-empty arcade. “I go through my message requests, and I have like a paragraph about how I changed someone’s life,” he says. “And I’m like, ‘I’m just being myself.’ I want to show people like, bro, I was just a dirty guy from the Bronx too. If I could do it, you could do it just by being yourself.” Guapo feels around his pocket for his ticket card as he eyes a redemption round on Dance Dance Revolution.
in the lead image: ALL CLOTHING AND ACCESSORIES VALENTINO
hair: KIYONORI SUDO using R+Co at L’Atelier NYC
makeup: ALEX LEVY using Mac Cosmetics
nails: MAMIE ONISHI AT SEE MANAGEMENT
set design: CAZ SLATTERY
photography assistants: ZACH HELPER & EVE ALPERT
digital technician: ROBERT WAGONER
styling assistant: VINCENTE KANACRI
set assistants: KALLIOPE PIERSOL & ANDREW RILEY
location: THE HANCOCK FOUNDATION
production: THE MORRISON GROUP
post production: NIKITA SHALETIN