The vibe in the West Hollywood mansion of Tana Mongeau, the influencer wild child, is surprisingly wholesome. It’s an earlySeptember afternoon, and the sun streams through big windows into her Nancy Meyers–esque kitchen, where she perches on a stool at a long marble countertop. In the same open-concept room, her assistant, Paige Camerlin, is quietly typing on her laptop on one end of a leather sectional; on the other, Mongeau’s boyfriend, Makoa, is curled up in a hoodie reading a book. “It’s about cacao farmers in the early 1900s,” he tells me, “and the industrialism of how that all took place.” Mongeau looks amused. “That shows the difference between the two of us,” she says with the raspy voice of someone who stays in the club past last call. “I will be sitting there reading, like, a Pamela Anderson autobiography.” Despite the domestic tableau, Mongeau is still more troublemaker than tradwife: Her nipples show through a white tank top, her hair is dyed platinum blonde, and she constantly pulls from a pale-pink nicotine vape.
In 2020, her homelife was comically lawless by comparison. Mongeau, pronounced “mojo,” was renting a ten-bedroom glass mansion with eight friends in the same Hollywood Hills compound where Justin Bieber and Nelly used to live. It had a movie theater and stripper pole, she says, and was next door to the Hype House, where a gaggle of Gen-Z influencers slept, filmed content, and threw parties. “There would be 100 random influencers circulating in and out of my house to make TikToks every single day,” she says. “I thought I wanted that.” Now, her ambitions have changed along with the weight of her influence.
This story is from the September 23 - October 6, 2024 edition of New York magazine.
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This story is from the September 23 - October 6, 2024 edition of New York magazine.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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