On a brisk afternoon in Washington Square Park, a petite 76-year-old woman wearing Versace sunglasses and a hoodie studied the scene around her. She goes by Judi Jupiter, and as buskers strummed guitars and New York University students read books on benches, she was searching for something.
“It’s just a feeling,” she said. “When I know, I know.”
She spotted a tall young man wearing a red Balenciaga hoodie and Timberlands. She raced up to him, phone in hand, and started filming.
“Oh, look at you,” she said.
She pelted him with questions: What’s your name? What’s your Instagram? What do you do?
He said he was a 21-year-old model named Waylon Rose.
Jupiter hit him with her signature question: “Want to do a spin for me?”
He twirled for her with a catwalk flourish.
“I love these baggy pants,” she said.
“You’re Judi Jupiter, aren’t you?” he said. “I recognize your voice from the videos. Your posts have been getting around. I guess I’ve been hoping one day I might run into you and that you’d stop me.”
Among the Instagram and TikTok set, Judi Jupiter has emerged as one of New York’s most improbable chroniclers of downtown street style. With an approach that’s one part Bill Cunningham and one part Studs Terkel, she has broken through the algorithm with her affable manner and borderline invasive curiosity. She’s just as compelled by a model-skater wearing Rick Owens as she is a philosophy major in a thrift shop scarf.
“I love the Gen Z’s,” Jupiter said. “I love their attitude. They think the world is in a bad place and that we’ve got to make it better. That’s their thing. They’re into making things better.”
“I’m a Gen Z, too,” she added. “I moved to New York from Detroit at 24, and I’m still 24 in my head, so they’re my people. The Gen Z’s only like talking to people their own age, and since they can tell I’m like them, they talk to me. If someone looks over 30, I don’t even interview them.”
“They all saw my Sabrina Carpenter video,” she continued. “I still don’t understand why I went viral. There’s no answers. There’s no 4-1-1.”
Jupiter’s brush with Ms. Carpenter last summer brought legions of followers to her TikTok and Instagram accounts. The clip, which has netted millions of views, shows Jupiter interviewing the pop star as she walks through SoHo with her entourage. The video’s charm comes from the fact that Jupiter is unaware of who Ms. Carpenter is.
“Hi, how are ya? What’s your name?”
“Sabrina,” Ms. Carpenter replies.
“You look spectacular,” Jupiter says.
Her later street interviews with other young celebrities unknown to her, like Troye Sivan and Kyrie Irving, only added to her social media mystique.
“I never know who these people are,” Jupiter said. “I don’t read the newspaper or follow the news. I cry when I read the news, so why would I? But I don’t get star-struck. Back in the 1970s, I met every celebrity there ever was at Studio 54, where I was a house photographer, so I don’t get star-struck.”
As evening approached, in SoHo, she scanned the streets with darting eyes.
“Over 600,000 people are following me now,” she said. “It scares the hell out of me. How many are stalkers? I live alone. I don’t have a dog. I don’t have a gun. I got wasp spray.”
Crossing Houston Street, she talked about her interactions with Gen Z.
“Someone told me I need to ‘heart’ more and comment back more to them, but I don’t always understand their language. They call me a ‘goat’ a lot. I don’t know what it means. I always have to look up what they’re saying on Google. Sometimes Google doesn’t even know.”
“I like them better as a generation than the millennials,” she went on. “The millennials stopped freedom of speech and got on guys for putting their arm on a girl. But I hear Gen Z’s aren’t having sex. I think lots of them also don’t have jobs, because I interview most of them while they’re just hanging out in the middle of the workday. But I’m not down on people having rich parents. It’s nice to be taken care of.”
When she arrived outside the brasserie Balthazar, someone called out from the corner: “Judi!” It was a scrum of downtown content creators, and they were all hanging out, taking a break from filming. One of them, David Carmi, runs @confidenceheist, in which he asks people what makes them confident. Another, Preppy Pete, runs the street style account @gothamgalleria.
“Get anything good today?” Jupiter asked.
“I got this one girl on Spring Street who gave me an amazing answer when I asked what’s her purpose,” Mr. Carmi said.
He broke away to approach someone with his microphone: “Excuse me, miss, you look really confident. What’s your secret?”
Afterward, Mr. Carmi considered Jupiter’s entry to the content creator economy.
“Getting out here into the streets to make content, it’s uncomfortable to start,” he said. “With Judi, she’s especially targeting Gen Z, and I think she’s showing people that by just approaching a stranger, and asking them to do a spin, she’s asking them to be themselves.”
Lately Jupiter has started making money from her content. She gets requests from record labels to promote their artists with staged versions of her whimsical street interviews, for which she charges up to $2,500. Her sponsored videos have included encounters with the rock artist Sombr and the Greek pop star Konstantinos Argiros.
“I’m looking for an agent,” she said. “I want one of the top three. I tried contacting William Morris but they told me I needed ‘referrals’ to be considered.”
She entered Balthazar, strutting past the hostesses.
“Hi, girls,” she said.
She made her way past the bar, scouring for stylish characters. There, in a red booth, was the singer-songwriter Sam Smith, wearing an unbuttoned wide lapel shirt, having lunch with two friends. She started recording.
“Sam, is this your first time here?” she asked.
“Oh, I’m not doing interviews,” Smith said. “I’m eating.”
“What’s your Instagram?” she said.
“Sam Smith.”
A Balthazar staff member approached and told Jupiter it was time to leave.
Back outside, as she started walking to Chinatown, I asked if she felt rattled to be rejected by a celebrity.
“No, because everyone’s the same to me,” she said. “I had a date once with Keith Richards. I saw it all already.”
In the kitchen of her small apartment, in a creaky walk-up in Little Italy, Jupiter reminisced about the 1970s, when she was a fixture at Studio 54.
“I made him laugh,” she said, gesturing toward a photo of herself with Andy Warhol at the fabled disco. “There aren’t many good pictures of Andy laughing.”
Judi Jupiter was born Judy Lynn DeLong in 1949 and grew up in Detroit as the daughter of a prosperous sheet metal engineer. As a teenager, she immersed herself in the Motown scene, sneaking out to the clubs where she saw the Temptations and Stevie Wonder. She hung out with mobsters in Greektown and shoplifted at malls to stifle her boredom.
“I was born quick, competitive, ambitious and with a great body, but I was also born in the Midwest,” Jupiter said. “I’d go through 10 friends a day in my teens, burning them out, then picking up a new one. I was always bored growing up.”
At 24, she drove to New York with her two cats in a U-Haul truck. She got a job at Macy’s, fell into the downtown punk scene and began dating a CBGB’s bartender. To help pay the rent, she did some nude modeling for Meryl Meisler, who became her photographic mentor. They documented Times Square with their cameras while working as waitresses in go-go bars and strip clubs. Some of their pictures appeared in the porn magazines Cheri and High Society.
“When Studio 54 opened, my hairdresser boyfriend told me it was going to be the hottest thing ever,” Jupiter said. “I believed him, because hairdressers know everything in New York.”
She asked around and learned that Studio 54’s public relations agency was Gifford-Wallace. She visited its offices one afternoon and cold-pitched herself as a publicity photographer. They put her on the list, along with Ms. Meisler, and the gig involved making the disco look as glamorous as possible.
“Studio 54 felt like the Roaring Twenties when I got there,” she said. “It was a time when people still looked into each other’s eyes. They didn’t have a phone in their eyes. They had people in their eyes.”
Often wearing just a bikini, she aimed her Leica at scenes of unguarded celebrity activity night after night. Moments seared into her mind include the supermodel Janice Dickinson hanging from the rafters as she sang to Mick Jagger. On another night, she found the Machiavellian political operative Roy Cohn slumped over on a couch in a dark corner.
Jupiter led the way to her living room. Heaped throughout were portfolios of her Studio 54 photos and clippings of the columns she wrote for adult magazines. She flipped through some favorite shots. Next to the pictures were the annotations she had scribbled long ago.
Debbie Harry, caught off-guard by her flash in the bathroom line: “We were all waiting in line for a stall,” Jupiter wrote. “She is wearing a peach antique dress.”
Christopher Reeve, seated with a pack of Marlboros: “I pinched his ass and he turned around and smiled sweetly.”
Bianca Jagger, on the dance floor with Halston: “Bianca was at Studio 54 every night, not always present was Mick, who was bored of going out every night to Studio 54. It’s rumored that Studio 54 and her constant need to go out ended their marriage.”
As the club slid into decline in the 1980s, Jupiter made her exit. “I got bored,” she said. She had done some modeling on the side, so she decided to start an agency of her own: Judith’s Models.
“We specialized in petite women, like me, and I did really well,” Jupiter said. “Five foot two to five foot six. If they were any taller, they could go to Eileen Ford, they could go to Elite. But if they were petite? There was nowhere else to go.”
“Eventually, I got into a whole lot of trouble,” she added.
Her agency thrived into the 1990s, with a roster of 80 models and an office on Sutton Place. Then she ran afoul of consumer affairs regulations, promising jobs to prospective models and operating without a license. Her reputation sank. Television news crews staked out her workplace.
“They couldn’t put me in jail for it,” Jupiter said. “But anytime I was in trouble, I ignored it. I’m still the same way.”
The city finally closed her business in 2004. A New York Post headline read: “Scam Model Agency Shut Down.”
“I’d once made a fortune, but I was always broke by Monday,” Jupiter said. “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, even homeless. I was always lousy with money. My friends say I have an impulse control problem.”
As she entered her 70s and the pandemic hit New York, she lived off unemployment. That’s when she started chronicling the city with her phone and posting dispatches to an Instagram account. Her first videos included her chatting up an elderly woman who sipped a margarita alone at a Mexican restaurant. Then she found her subject: Gen Z.
“I’d become an angry person from everything that happened,” she said. “But I started feeling like the old Judi again, the one that came to New York all starry eyed. The girl from Studio 54. Except I’d never gone viral before.”
That evening, Jupiter was hot on the chase for more content. She ambled through Little Italy, studying the tourists in the trattorias.
“Wait — maybe them,” she said, noticing a group of young women.
They looked up.
“Actually, nah,” she said. “They’re nothing special.”
Outside Sofia’s restaurant on Mulberry Street, she was drawn to a slender man wearing a white beret and penny loafers. He was a 28-year-old host, Lautaro Posadas. She made her approach.
“You filmed me a long time ago, when you were just starting,” he said. “Now you’re doing well. I’m seeing your videos always. Everyone wants to be a star in New York, I guess.”
Jupiter had already trained her phone on him.
“Want to do a spin for me?”
Alex Vadukul is a features writer for the Styles section of The Times, specializing in stories about New York City.
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