A day in the life of Keeva Leddy, a 16-year-old in Manhattan, has a lot of moving parts.
First, she puts on her school uniform — a polo and a light blue pleated skirt — before boarding the bus near her home on the Upper East Side to her private high school. She stops at Blank Street Coffee for an iced latte with oat milk before heading to a morning full of classes. For lunch, she and her friends pop over to Butterfield Market, which she calls “the Erewhon of New York City,” for some sushi, before returning for afternoon classes. After school, she goes home — in an Uber or the subway — to relax, or heads to SoHo to browse the selections at Brandy Melville and Garage.
Ms. Leddy, who recently started her junior year, shares days like this and more on her TikTok account, KeevaGRWM, which she started earlier this year as part of the “get ready with me” trend. She’s one of a handful of Manhattan teens who have found an audience on the app in recent months by posting videos showing what it’s like to grow up in New York City.
Ms. Leddy’s 41,000 followers — many of whom are fellow teens from other parts of the country — eagerly tune in, hoping to gain insight into the rarefied world of Manhattan’s elite teens.
“I get a lot of comments saying, ‘This is my dream life,’” Ms. Leddy said in a recent interview. “And other people are saying, ‘This is the life that I want to give my kids.’ And I think that’s so beautiful, because I was just sharing my life, and my mom has worked really hard to give me this kind of lifestyle.”
Trip Gorman, a 16-year-old student at the Loyola School, said he decided to start his TikTok account when he noticed there were not any boys his age posting “day in the life” videos. Despite some initial fears about how his content would be perceived, he has built an audience of 22,000 followers since he started his account in April. His most recent video, chronicling his first day of senior year, has more than three million views.
Mr. Gorman, who was born in Taiwan and was adopted by Irish American parents, has lived nearly his entire life in New York. He said the city was a big reason his content had been so popular.
“Everyone loves New York City,” Mr. Gorman said. “There’s so many videos on TikTok that go viral just because it’s a video showing the landscape of New York City or a specific restaurant or store here.”
Ms. Leddy agreed with New York’s wide appeal, and said she’d tried for months to have her content gain traction before a video showing her spending the day shopping in SoHo with friends finally took off.
“I started thinking, what made this video go viral instead of my other ones?” she said. “New York City. New York City was a huge thing that everyone — every teen — wanted to know about. Everybody wants to see what New York City life is like.”
“I go to an all-girls school, so at the beginning, when I wasn’t getting a lot of views, some people were talking about it like, ‘What is she doing?’” she added. “But now that I started to get views and some more followers, now everybody wants to be in my TikToks.”
Allegra Pinkowitz, a 17-year-old high schooler who works at Brandy Melville, is the most well-known of the bunch. With nearly 150,000 followers, Ms. Pinkowitz rose to prominence by posting videos of her mugging in front of the subway on her way to school. Now she has a manager at Digital Brand Architects, and New York magazine called her “the most popular girl in SoHo.”
Mr. Gorman and Ms. Leddy both said that much of the interest in their content came from the popularity of “Gossip Girl,” the early-aughts teen drama that followed the lives of the young, rich and beautiful at a Manhattan private school. Though the show first aired in 2007, its availability on streaming platforms has inspired a resurgence among Gen Z.
“It’s still the ‘it’ girl show,” Ms. Leddy said. “Everyone’s still watching that, and then they’re seeing me go to the Met and these other places, and they’re like, ‘This is where ‘Gossip Girl’ goes.’”
Mr. Gorman and Ms. Leddy both hope to parlay their recent social media success into future careers. Mr. Gorman said that he wanted to study marketing at New York University and that he hoped to partner with fashion houses for branded content. Ms. Leddy said she was focused on continuing in the world of social media influencers.
“It’s my passion,” she said. “I actually do love being on camera, and I love talking to people, and I love sharing my life.”
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