Chariah Gordon isn’t easily rattled. Except when she’s running late.
From the driver’s seat of her custom Mercedes SUV, Gordon taps a manicured finger on the wheel and blasts Future a bit louder from the speakers. “Come on,” she says under her breath, waiting for a gap to materialize in an unusually long line of cars outside her upscale neighborhood in Leawood, Kansas. She takes the pause as a chance to change the color of the car’s interior LED lights to a deep blood red. Chiefs colors. Then, spotting a break in the endless stream, she steps on the gas. She has a game to attend.
A few hours later Gordon emerges triumphant into the club-level suite at Arrowhead Stadium. It was a close call with the traffic, but she made it onto the field just in time to give a pregame hug and kiss to her fiancé, Chiefs star wide receiver Mecole Hardman Jr., and, of course, snap a few photos and videos for her nearly 250,000 followers on Instagram. Crisis averted. Now she can relax.
Dressed in wide-leg gray light-wash jeans from Casablanca, a matching cropped jacket over a white tank, and silver Steve Madden pumps, the 29-year-old Gordon is immediately surrounded by her friends and fellow Chiefs WAGs, such as Sheawna Weathersby, Amina Smith, and Nani Hinton. Since she fell in love with Hardman in 2020 and moved from her hometown of Chicago to Kansas City to be with him, these girls have become like family.
“I think we have made it a safe place for each other to feel comfortable to talk, because we all are in the same situation,” she tells me in an interview. “We’re not from here. We all are first-time mothers, and our guys go through certain things, and we lean into each other.”
The suite, which is filled with not just the WAGs but a host of friends and family who have come to see the game, has a neighborhood-barbeque feel. People flow in and out from the stands, where they will watch the Chiefs go on to beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in overtime, to inside the suite, where they make plates of chicken and mac n’ cheese and play music. Weathersby, whom everyone calls She She, immediately announces, not for the first time, that it is “shot o’clock,” and begins pouring Casamigos into little plastic cups.
“I wasn’t saying, ‘Oh my God, this is Taylor.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, this is one of my home girls from back home.”
-Chariah Gordon
Gordon’s makeup artist and friend Joshua Minger rushes to her side and spends the game periodically giving her lip touch-ups for the inevitable photos. Not just the Instagram snaps she and the rest of her friends will take—the photos of Gordon that will be blasted all over the world that night as she sits next to her newest WAG bestie, Taylor Swift. During the game Gordon bounces back and forth between this suite, which belongs to Weathersby and her partner, defensive tackle Chris Jones, and the suite where Swift watches the game with the family and friends of her boyfriend, tight end Travis Kelce.
Photos of the two of them clutching each other in glee when the Chiefs brought home the win would soon go viral, and the following Saturday the Swifties will similarly gush over photos Gordon posted on Instagram of Swift holding her six-month-old daughter, Cianna, with the caption “Auntie Tay.” But for Gordon, Swift is just one of her friends.
“I call her my sis, that’s my sis,” she says. “She’s just really a sweet, down-to-earth girl. I forgot that she was even Taylor Swift, that’s how she makes you feel. I wasn’t saying, ‘Oh my God, this is Taylor.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, this is one of my home girls from back home.’”
This trademark easygoing spirit is uniquely Gordon and may explain how she not only befriended the world’s biggest pop star, but built a girl gang from scratch in the four years since she became a WAG. In doing so, Gordon has created a community that all the women clearly cherish—and that has also made them some of the most famous women in professional sports. Gordon, having amassed an Instagram following, is doing brand deals, and fans eagerly await her content every game day to see what she’s wearing, what she’s doing, and who she’s with. And all her friends are following her lead, amassing social media followings and building brands of their own.
As Gordon laughs and cheers with her friends, she periodically comes up to me and touches my arm.
“You good?” she asks, flashing a smile. “Are you having fun? You swear?”
I assure her I am. How could I not be?
The first thing I learn when Gordon agrees to let me shadow her and her friends on a Chiefs game day is that our day will start early.
I arrive at Gordon’s home around noon, dressed in my best amalgamation of what could be called my own WAG style. I did my own makeup but layered on a bit more than I usually would and brought lipstick for touch-ups (Gordon told me she had a clear purse for me to bring to the stadium, so I arrived carrying my stuff in a distinctly not-WAG-approved plastic bag). For clothes I combed through the myriad emails I have received this fall on WAG style until I stumbled upon one announcing a new collection of NFL-designed jackets released by Veronica Beard. The publicist agreed to let me borrow the Chiefs style for the game to complete my look, which kind of gave me a WAG/office siren vibe.
After I come inside, jacket and plastic bag in tow, I am quickly followed in the door by Minger, who begins setting up his tools, chairs, and of course, ring light. The game, if you’re wondering, starts at 7:15 p.m., but Minger has a schedule he needs to stick to. He is doing makeup for Gordon, three other Chiefs WAGs, and a few of Gordon’s non-WAG friends, and yes, he does this for all the home games. The vibe is analogous to a wedding, where bridesmaids chat, eat, and drink while getting glam one by one. And similarly to a wedding, the ritual isn’t just about looking good. It’s about hanging out and having fun with your girls.
Gordon wasn’t always the type of woman who had a MUA on standby for a Monday Night Football game, but she’s always been ambitious. Born and raised in Chicago, Gordon began taking singing lessons when she was 9 year old and by age 19 was recording her own songs and touring as an artist. She describes herself as a “mostly R&B” artist who dabbled in other genres like rap and reggae, and was signed to Cash Money Records and collaborated with Megan Thee Stallion when the superstar was first starting out.
But when COVID hit, Gordon pivoted. Her music opportunities were dry because of the pandemic, so she began to work on starting a skin care line called Glo Collection. Also in 2020, Gordon first crossed paths with Hardman—well, virtually. She came across his profile on Instagram and thought he was cute, so she gave a few of his photos a like. He “liked” her pictures back, and she finally slid into his DMs.
“We exchanged numbers from there, and then the rest was history,” she says.
“With us, it’s like what you see is what you get.”
-Chariah Gordon
Gordon moved to Kansas City, but she didn’t dive head first into WAG life. After all, there were a lot of changes at once.
“I didn’t really talk to the girls my first year,” she says. “I was just into my relationship and getting a feel for Kansas City and a feel for him, seeing if this was something we really wanted to pursue and be serious with.”
Soon they realized they did. In 2022, Gordon got pregnant with their first child, son Mecole Hardman III, whom they call Three. Three was born several weeks early on the day of Super Bowl LVII in 2023 while the couple were in Arizona for the game, and since then Gordon’s life hasn’t stopped. The couple welcomed their second child, daughter Cianna, or CiCi, in May 2024, and Hardman popped the question to Gordon that next month in an elaborate proposal featuring huge LED letters spelling out “Will you marry me” (Hardman then put on a seriously adorable shirt reading “she said yes”).
Gordon thinks, though, that the reason she has gained such a following from posting about her life with Hardman is not because of the glitzy moments, but because of the real ones.
“With us, it’s like what you see is what you get,” she says. “We fight, we argue, we cry, we have happy moments…. I feel like that transferred to the internet and to people being like, ‘They are not just doing this because it’s cool. They really love each other and I can relate to their situation.’”
In real life Gordon gives off that same relatable vibe. Fresh from the shower, Gordon greets Minger before pulling out a few fruit and veggie platters for the girls and setting them up on the table (she’s also ordered Chinese). Three, now 21 months, zooms around the room, playing with his toys and being tended to by Gordon and her godmother turned nanny, whom Gordon says“retired” earlier this year in order to help with the kids full time.
Soon the girls begin to arrive. Over the past few years, they all tell me, the support they have built together has become a lifeline. Weathersby is the veteran of the group, in both Chiefs-dom and motherhood. When Jones was drafted in the second round in 2016, Weathersby moved from her home state of Mississippi to be with him. She was a young new mom completely on her own in a new state and struggled without a support system.
Most of the women say they were brought into the fold by Weathersby or Gordon, and Weathersby takes pride in creating the sort of community that she wished she had back then. Now a mom to three boys (she and Jones have two boys, ages six and two, and Jones has an eight-year-old son from a previous relationship) she serves as both den mother and chief fun officer, as likely to make sure an older family member has a place to sit down in the suite as she is to pour everyone another round.
“We have a good group,” she tells me later in the suite, smiling with pride. The night’s only flaw is that her Instagram is down. Someone impersonated her, got it verified, and got her real account suspended. Now she’s messaging back and forth with support to get it reinstated and has nowhere to share the photos of her immaculate ’fit: a sweater reading “Miss Dior” in Chiefs red, a pleated cheerleader-style skirt, and thigh-high leopard boots (when she makes her triumphant return to the platform, she shares a photo of herself in the outfit, posing with Swift and her son at the game; the post gets 5,000 likes).
By the time 3 p.m. rolls around at Gordon’s house, the pregame to the pregame, as Weathersby calls it, is in full swing. Joining Gordon and Weathersby are Marissa Rand, the girlfriend of safety Justin Reid, and Amina Smith, the wife of safety Deon Bush.
While they aren’t getting glam, they pour drinks (Rand pouts in mock sadness, she’s seven months pregnant) and go in on the lo mein and orange chicken. Both of Gordon’s kids are being passed around, even though Three is technically supposed to be napping. This isn’t unusual for the group. They see each other all the time, especially when the guys are at long practices or away for days.
“It’s kind of like college, or having sisters.”
-Marissa Rand
“We get together at each other’s houses a lot,” Rand tells me as we snuggle into Gordon’s couch. “We play pickleball, watch movies, and work out together. They’ll call me or I’ll call them, ‘I am five minutes away from your house, I’m coming in.’ You’re alone all the time, so you have to navigate into each other’s lives. You’re stuck together. It’s a lot of fun. It’s kind of like college, or having sisters.”
For Gordon, who says she’s currently just coming up for air after the first six months of having two kids under age two, having the WAGs around has been a lifeline.
“I see them probably almost every other day, and it helps and it works,” she says. “I couldn’t imagine just sitting in the house and just not having any type of outlet, being overstimulated.”
Smith doesn’t get to catch as many of the hangs at the rest, because she’s currently only here part-time during the season. As her husband’s football career has been rising, so has her own career as a sports journalist. After spending years reporting at local stations, Smith was hired by Sports Center as an anchor earlier this year. Now she and the couple’s toddler son commute between Mom’s job in Connecticut and Dad’s job in Kansas City.
“It’s [all about] having the right partner,” she tells me. “I feel like if I didn’t have my husband that I have right now, it probably wouldn’t work…We look at it from a different perspective. We’re sacrificing this small amount of time for the greater good of our family.”
In the midst of her busy schedule, Smith cherishes the time she gets to kick back, relax, and hang with the other wives. But she’s also in the media industry, and she realizes how being a WAG can help her build her personal brand. Last year she posted a five-second clip of herself hugging Bush to TikTok, and it got 1.3 million views.
“I was like, ‘Well, if you guys like it, I love it,’” she says. “I was like, ‘You want more? I’ll give you more.’”
Like Smith, all the WAGs realize they have an opportunity with the newfound attention on them, even if sometimes it makes them laugh. When I tell Gordon I think the Chiefs WAGs are the NFL’s coolest, she shakes her head.
“Even more than [redacted]?” she asks, naming an NFL team with a roster of both internet-famous and celebrity WAGs. Yes, definitely, I say.
Gordon smiles. Part of what makes the Chiefs WAGs so cool, I realize, is that they do seem like people you could have a great time with at the “pregame to the pregame.” And yes, that even includes Swift. Being a WAG has made Swift, a billionaire megastar, seem like a normal, relatable girl who kicks back, has a beer, and eats chicken tenders and “seemingly ranch” with her girls.
“The Chiefs are hot, the girls are hot. This is something to get into.”
-Chariah Gordon
Gordon insists that Swift’s normalcy is what drew them together. They first met at Kelce’s house, where, she says, they just clicked and began chatting about what they had in common. She laughs when she talks about how now everyone wants to know how she “got” Swift to become her friend, because she has no answer besides being herself. The superstar is just one of the gang of girls who support each other, like, she says, when Swift took time to knit CiCi a blanket in between her London Eras Tour shows last summer.
“It’s so freaking cute and so thoughtful,” she says. “She said that her aunt did it for her when she was a kid and she wanted to do the same for me. So she in-between shows making blankets and keeping my kids super near.”
But Gordon says she noticed an uptick in attention even before Swift joined their ranks.
“The Chiefs are hot, the girls are hot,” she says. “This is something to get into. She just amplified it, which I feel like was going to happen regardless. They won two Super Bowls back-to-back. It was already getting crazy.”
There does seem to be something in the air with the Chiefs. I’m not an NFL fan and can probably count on one hand the number of professional football games I’ve attended, but I have to say I get it. When the Chiefs (in my mind, I don’t know) miraculously came back in overtime to win, it was hard not to whoop and cheer. And among the glitter and glam— plus relatability and fun—of the Chiefs WAGs, it’s hard not to want to want to be them too.
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For Gordon all this new attention is an opportunity. She wants to grow her businesses, start new ones, and continue to grow her personal brand. But she also wants to make an impact, and as a self-described girl’s girl, she sees a way how.
“I plan to use my platform just to show women that it can be done,” she says. “You can have the lifestyle, the man, the kid, your own business, and be your own entity. I want to show I am more than just my significant other’s partner…I want to show women that you don’t have to be in the shadows or dim your light. You can shine just as bright as you’re supposed to and to just keep going. I think we face challenges all the time and some women give up or some women feel like ‘I’m not good enough’ or ‘I’m not this’ or ‘I’m not that.’”
She then gives what essentially may as well be the Chiefs WAG mantra.
“I’m going to support my man at the game,” she says. “And I’m going to clap for myself just as loud.”
The post Chariah Gordon and the WAGS of the Kansas City Chiefs are Having a Blast in the Spotlight appeared first on Glamour.
