Sofia Richie Grainge: Queen of the Tiktokracy

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links."

Last July, Sofia Richie Grainge was on vacation, enjoying a much needed respite from her taxing wedding and honeymoon, when she suffered a minor maritime mishap. Zooming around on an eFoil, a Jetsonsesque electric surfboard that levitates above the water, she lost her balance and was thrown onto the board, emerging from the collision with a champagne-colored bruise around her left eye.

That evening, on a yacht trip around the island where she was staying, the 25-year-old influencer took to Instagram to share some photos of her shiner, which she wryly captioned “Wakeboard 1, Sof: 0” and which, somehow, chicly matched her coral-colored Chanel frock. By the next morning her accident was international news. On Instagram, where Richie Grainge has amassed an astonishing 10.8 million followers, her black eye photos quickly racked up nearly a million likes. Some worried fans fretted about her health. Others hailed her for a bold fashion choice. “Leave it to Sofia to make black eyes cool,” enthused one commenter. “Where can I find a black eye like that?”

By the time we meet up a couple of weeks later, at a tony Brentwood coffee shop, the bruise has largely faded. “I’m glad you survived!” I joke as she slides into her banquette, trailed by her assistant and her manager. “Can you believe that?” she says, giggling. “People were like, ‘Sofia got a black eye, so I want a black eye.’ I was like, ‘No, no, no! That’s a bad idea.’” But she has also learned over the last several months how to seize opportunities when they present themselves. A few days later she posted on TikTok a makeup tutorial inspired by the surfboard smack heard ’round the world. “I think you’ve all heard of my incident,” she said before instructing her 3 million followers in how to erase unsightly blemishes with the aid of a YSL Touche Eclat concealer pen.

Anyone who doesn’t spend their time scrolling may still be wondering: Who is Sofia Richie Grainge, anyway? It’s a fair question. The youngest member of a very famous family—she’s the daughter of Lionel Richie and his former wife, the fashion designer Diane Alexander—has been, at various points in her young life, a model, a singer, an actor, and a designer. But this spring she became the thing that has given her the most traction yet: a budding fashion icon.

At a time when social media is minting new celebrities at a breakneck pace—often for behavior and taste that are dubious at best—Richie Grainge’s ascent to the fashion A-list has been particularly turbocharged and notably high-end. The It girl of 2023, she has garnered a devoted following across the country—and not just among Gen Z but among true fashionistas and suburban housewives twice her age. On Instagram there are accounts dedicated solely to cataloging her bags, shoes, and outfits. (“I’m so flattered by that,” she says. “They’ll ask me, ‘Where’s this bag from? I can’t find these pants,’ and I’ll send them the link. So we’re in cahoots!”) Her TikTok account, which she launched just two days before her wedding last April, ballooned to 3 million followers in three months. Nowadays, when she ventures out, she is trailed by paparazzi and people asking for selfies.

Richie Grainge has taken this rapid rise in stride. Though she looks almost airbrushed when we meet, even in ripped jeans and a white T-shirt, she is funny and self-effacing. “I learned how to deal with people knowing who you are from my dad. He handles it with such grace. He embraces everyone who comes up to him. He’s appreciative, he’s thankful. He’s taught me to never have that ‘Oh god, not today’ attitude. He’s another level of megastar, and my whole life I’ve watched him. I’ve never seen him say no to a picture. I’ve never seen him be rude to anyone who walks up to him on the street. That’s been my role model.”

Indeed, Richie Grainge is no stranger to celebrity and its trappings. Her sister Nicole Richie, 17 years her senior (“She’s the same, very gracious and polite and thankful,” Richie Grainge attests) rocketed to pop culture fame co-starring with Paris Hilton in The Simple Life, the early aughts TV show that is variously credited or blamed for kicking off the reality show era. Michael Jackson was Sofia’s god­father. She walked her first red carpet when she was 10. With her ethereal golden girl looks and gold-plated family name, it didn’t take long for fashion brands to come knocking. At 15 she signed with the ­London-based agency Select Model Management, scoring bookings with Michael Kors, Tommy Hilfiger, and Adidas. Walking for Chanel in Paris was the pinnacle. But she had other ambitions: Trying her hand at design, she produced a line of bright beachwear for Frankies swimsuits and a 60-piece collection for Macy’s. Madonna hired her as the face of her Material Girl line. On Richie Grainge’s Instagram account, she has promoted Cheetos and Coca-Cola.

But for a long time she mostly drew attention for her private life and famous exes. She also briefly embarked on a musical career, but after a year with a vocal coach she decided to pursue acting instead. Though she landed a few minor roles, she eventually gave that up as well.

“I spent a lot of time just trying to find my place in the world,” she says. “I think everyone wants to be like their parents when they’re growing up, and I admired my dad so much, and that drove me down a music path for a moment. But it didn’t feel right for me. And then everyone told me, ‘You should be an actor!’ I tried that for a period, but that wasn’t me either. I didn’t have the experience, and I didn’t want to be one of those kid celebrities that got the role because my dad is who he is. So I was like, ‘You know what? I know I’m not cut out for this. Let me just be myself.’ ”

As it turned out, being herself proved a savvy career move. She had a passion for clothes and a quirky style that stood out even when she was in high school. Fashion runs in her family. Her mom, Diane, built a successful career as a designer. And after a few years in the reality TV wilderness, Nicole eventually settled down and started a family with her husband, the musician Joel Madden, and reinvented herself as a style maven and designer of the lifestyle brand House of Harlow 1960. But Richie Grainge also knew that first she needed to find her own aesthetic identity.

“The evolution that I personally wanted to have with my style— that has been a focus for me for the past two years,” she says. That also corresponds to the time she has worked with her stylist, Liat Baruch, a longtime friend of Nicole’s. “I thought about what makes me feel the most confident in myself as a woman. And when I dressed a bit more sophisticated was when I felt the most empowered. So I embraced that.”

Fortuitously, her personal evolution coincided with a shift in the fashion world away from the ostentatious, flashy, skin-­baring looks that were ubiquitous in the immediate post-pandemic era. “Stealth wealth” suddenly became fashion’s new catchphrase, epitomized by Kendall Roy’s Loro Piana baseball cap and Gwyneth Paltrow’s luxe courtroom knits. For her part, Richie Grainge issued an endless series of Instagram posts in which she cast herself as an avatar of the new “quiet luxury” trend, serving up monochromatic looks, tasteful matte makeup, and expensive but discreet jewelry. The response was beyond what she had imagined. “It was a bit shocking, the fact that a new generation would be interested in dressing that way,” she says.

Then came the event that sent her into the stratosphere: her wedding in the south of France to Elliot Grainge, the bespectacled 29-year-old British-born son of Universal Music Group CEO Lucian Grainge, a longtime friend and collaborator of Lionel Richie’s. Sofia went public with the relationship in the spring of 2021 and in November posted a photo of her kissing Grainge. Though he’s a frequent supporting player in Sofia’s curated social feeds, his own verified Instagram account does not feature a single post. She says he’s more comfortable staying out of the limelight, but in April 2022, while the couple were vacationing in Hawaii, he enjoyed his own starring moment. Grainge got down on one knee to propose, at dusk on a candlelit terrace and with a huge emerald-cut diamond engagement ring. Their wedding became an event of royal proportions, the most public union since Harry met Meghan. To house their 190 guests (among them Cameron Diaz, Talita von Furstenberg, and Princess Olympia of Greece) for two nights, the couple rented out the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc. Richie Grainge was intimately involved in the weekend’s details. “I wanted it to feel timeless. I pored over photos of classic royal weddings and pulled in little things that I wanted.”

There were lots of tears when Lionel walked his daughter down the aisle, proudly exclaiming, “That’s my kid!” and later serenading the crowd with a couple of his hits. There were cheers when Grainge, in a white yarmulke, broke the glass under the flower-strewn chuppah. (Richie Grainge, who was raised Christian, converted to Judaism before the wedding under the tutelage of a Los Angeles–based cantor.)

But ultimately it was her costume changes—and her concurrent debut on TikTok—that most captured the public’s attention. Countless stories were devoted to the three custom-made Chanel dresses she wore that weekend. (The fashion house opened up its style archives to the young bride-to-be, and she took inspiration from old collections, including one look for her post-wedding party, a mini once modeled by Claudia Schiffer.) Richie Grainge insists their collaboration began as something of a lark. “I was desperately looking around for a wedding dress, and Chanel had been my favorite designer forever. So someone said, ‘Why don’t you do Chanel?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I wish it was that easy.’ And then we said, ‘Well, why don’t we ask?’ We reached out, and they were kind enough and open enough to do one dress, the wedding dress. And then that kind of segued into, ‘Okay, how am I going to ever find another designer for my rehearsal dinner that could balance out Chanel?’ So I went back to them, and I was like, ‘Feel free to say no…but would you mind doing another?’ They were so sweet, they did a couple more pieces.” It paid off, for everyone.

Richie Grainge says she reluctantly agreed to give up her phone on her wedding day, but she made up for it in the preceding days, walking her new and exploding TikTok audience through her fashion and beauty choices with gracious, articulate commentary that seemed, like her style, to belie her youth. Adee Drexler, an old family friend who has been Richie Grainge’s manager for the past five years, says her accessibility is the key to her success. “I think what people respond to is that she seems honest, down-to-earth,” Drexler says. She’s right. For all the over-the-top luxury—the $26 million Brentwood home, the high-­fashion name-dropping that clutters her social media feeds—there’s something appealingly low-key about her. She can be goofy and unguarded and unexpectedly guileless.

For Richie Grainge, her wedding was a professional turning point only in retrospect; she didn’t see it that way in the moment. “I do now,” she says. “But for me my wedding wasn’t an event. It was my wedding.” Since then, other It girls (Kylie Jenner among them) have been accused of trying to pull a Sofia Richie, donning uncharacteristically elegant looks in hopes of likes. I ask if she is ever exhausted by the constant melding of her public and private lives. She thinks it over, then slowly shakes her head. Back in her teen days, she says, she often suffered from anxiety, but she has come out the other side. “At age 22 I calmed down a lot,” she says. “I think I’ve grown a lot in these last couple of years.” She is careful about how much of her marriage ends up online. “We don’t live out our whole lives on Instagram. We know when to turn it off.” At the same time, Grainge, the founder of an independent record label, is a valuable resource, and not just as her picture perfect other half. “He’s good with social media because of his work with musicians. He understands TikTok, so he’s a great sounding board for me.”

Among the benefits of her It girl–ness, she hopes, is the ability to take on more behind-the-scenes roles. To that end she will soon announce her own fashion line; she has recruited a New York–based team of designers, and they’re aiming for a February 2024 launch. The vibe, of course, is quiet luxury. “If you like my Instagram, you’ll like this.”

As excited as she is about this new chapter, she’s taking nothing for granted. The fashion world is full of It girls who last a season or two and then fade away. Richie Grainge insists she’s in this for the long haul, but she tries to remember to enjoy the moment. “The truth is I’ve had a pretty lucky life, and I always try to remember that. It’s already been more than I could have dreamed of.”

Photography by Rebekah Campbell
Styling by Alison Edmond at Art Department

Hair by Yuichi Ishida. Makeup by Kara Yoshimoto Bua for CHANEL Beauty. Nails by Ashlie Johnson for The Wall Group. Production by Viewfinders LA. Shot on location at The, Georgian Hotel, Santa Monica CA.

In the Top image: Louis Vuitton robe jacket ($9,850), dress ($16,500), and sandals ($1,190); Lugano Diamonds earrings, necklace, bracelets, and rings; Sylva & Cie huggie earrings ($6,500).

This story appears in the September 2023 issue of Town & Country.
SUBSCRIBE NOW

You Might Also Like

• 12 Weekend Getaway Spas For Every Type of Occasion

• 13 Beauty Tools to Up Your At-Home Facial Game