JT Goes Wild On Ambition

The foremost trait of any true Sagittarius is unshakable confidence, so when I sit down across from JT after her It Girl shoot and tell her how pretty she looks in her classic ’90s Naomi Campbell glam, she runs with it. “I love when I look super pretty,” she says, without a blink. “I mean, I love grunge. I love that I can do everything. Not everybody could do everything and have it make sense. I’m just feeling so me.”

Self-worth has never been an issue for the Miami-born performer, who got her start as one half of the braggadocious rap duo City Girls and is now speeding ahead on solo career fueled entirely by her ability to be, well, so JT. She can go viral with a single word: When Zara Larsson recruited her for a remix of “Pretty Ugly” this spring, JT answered the song’s cheerleader-chant chorus — “Have you ever seen a pretty girl get ugly like this?” — with a single eye-rolling, gum-smacking “no” that lit up TikTok for days.

Now the artist born Jatavia Johnson is putting that I-can-do-it-all mindset to the test with her debut studio album, Club Cheetah, due later this year. “I’m so many things, and it’s so hard to describe my album,” she says. “It’s not a certain genre. It’s whatever the f*ck I want it to be.”

Her first single, “Girls Gone Wild,” paired Miami booty bass with an equally flamboyant music video starring some ‘90s-inspired fashion — a dancier departure that “didn’t gravitate to my core [audience],” she admits, “but who gives a f*ck? People are starting to love me overall, and that is the most beautiful feeling about this era. I’m seeing the fruits of my labor. I see the fashion, the music, and the beauty all in one house.” Rap music may be the vehicle, but crossover pop-star spectacle is the vision: “I feel like the songs are matching the clothes. I need to perform my songs. I want to feel like the Black Britney Spears. I want to feel like a ghetto Gaga, bitch.”

“Shout out to all the female rappers, but I’m so tired of fighting in that space. I’m too pretty for that.”

Such momentum isn’t lost on JT. “I won’t say this is my year, I would say this is my career,” the 33-year-old says. She has already endured her share of road blocks and false starts. At the height of City Girls’ popularity, she went to prison for roughly a year for identity theft related to credit card fraud; before serving time, she worked around the clock to bank songs and music videos to keep fans fed in her absence, only to formally finish her sentence on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic. By the time JT released her debut solo mixtape, City Cinderella, in 2024, she was burned out. “I needed a break, I took a break, and I deserved a break,” she says. “I deserved clarity.”

“I want to feel like the Black Britney Spears. I want to feel like a ghetto Gaga, bitch.”

She recounts this all with the same knack for rhythm on display in her most quotable guest verses, her speech effortless, emphatic, and unflappable. “I don’t give a f*ck who stands with JT, and I don’t care who’s against JT,” she tells me at one point. “To get to JT, you got to get through JT. I don’t play about JT, OK?”

The JT we’re meeting in 2026, however, is not only recharged but refreshingly above the drama that has occasionally swirled around her. “Shout out to all the female rappers, but I’m so tired of fighting in that space,” she says. “We have created such a dark energy over the years that’s making it so hard for all of us. I’m too pretty for that. I don’t want that to be the thing people think about me overall. But, if a bitch wants to take it there, we can.”

Her perspective changed after a sit-down with an industry peer (JT didn’t share the name) who told her she is “too much of a star for any of this” negativity. “I think of beef as a side course,” JT says. “My main focus right now is building my audience, my stage presence, my catalog, my magazine covers, and my campaigns. I’m counting my blessings now. I don’t have time for sh*t else.”

Among those blessings: her partner of six years, rapper Lil Uzi Vert. “We are so similar in every way. I just love him so much,” she says. Even when schedules and obligations pull them in different directions, they make it work: “We know how to motherf*cking maximize our lives, OK?”

Then there’s her friendship with Doechii. The pair dropped a collaboration, the bawdy jock jam “Alter Ego,” right before Doechii had her Grammy-winning glow-up with Alligator Bites Never Heal. “Doechii has been such a sister to me. I don’t give a f*ck what’s going on, Doechii’s bringing me out. She showed me true sisterhood in those moments. It’s like, you was with me when we both was chopped, OK?” JT says, laughing.

“I don’t give a f*ck who stands with JT, and I don’t care who’s against JT. To get to JT, you got to get through JT.”

When Doechii performed at the Dsquared2 fall/winter show in Milan last year, she enlisted JT to deliver “Alter Ego” live right on the runway, stomping around in the shortest black minidress and highest lace-up heels imaginable. (As if the shoes weren’t challenging enough, her headpiece made it so, in her words, “I could barely f*cking see”). A photo of the pair with Naomi Campbell at the end of the catwalk proved to haters (and perhaps even JT herself) that she is not one to underestimate. “When [Doechii] got her moment, she made sure she didn’t forget me.”

As JT carves out a solo identity, her own fashion prowess has been her ace. In any given week, you might catch her in a hair-covered coat from Marni, a strappy bodysuit from Luar, a fresh-off-the-runway Prada look with sunglasses built into a bandana, or a massive shearling hat and jacket from a Jean Paul Gaultier couture show. Her willingness to transform for a look has made her a muse to buzzy photographers (like Indiana Piorek, who shot her “Ran Out” music video), designers (she calls Vaquera’s Patric DiCaprio her “soulmate”), and brands (she’s starred in campaigns for MAC, Timberland, and Flower by Edie Parker).

“I love that I have relationships with these people, and that’s because I’m such a cool motherf*cker, for real,” JT says. (She credits prison for her ability to fit in with just about anyone: “I’m not awkward around anybody. People do not understand the diversity of prison.”)

Her commitment to couture is not just for social media, either. She purchased an extremely rare archival pair of Maison Margiela glass heels for the cover of her debut solo mixtape, City Cinderella, and she arrives at her NYLON shoot with her own wired version of Chanel’s flap bag from Matthieu Blazy’s debut runway collection. When I ask her about her most recent handbag purchase, she blanks — “I buy so much,” she deadpans — but gushes about the looks she’s turning on set: “I was in the sample size McQueen dress today, OK? Looking good!”

“I’m not awkward around anybody. People do not understand the diversity of prison.”

JT’s free-flowing personality has found a natural home on TikTok, where she regularly engages with her fans — lovingly dubbed the Juvies — in the comments. In one video, she might rant about her place in the industry from the back of a black car; the next, she’s walking her Mexican hairless dog, Skrilla, through downtown New York or waiting in line for matcha like a West Village girlie.

“You can be yourself on TikTok, for real,” she says. “It’s been so many years of me trying to defend my personality and myself, and I’m like, ‘Listen, bitch, if you can’t handle the heat, stay out of the kitchen.’ I’m not with that no more.”

She made lower Manhattan her full-time home in 2023. She’d spent the last few years ping-ponging between coasts but decided the city best matched her freak. “I go outside, I see a motherf*cker dressed like a butterfly that’s with somebody dressed like a businessman,” she says. “It’s so many different clubs and cultures here in New York, and I feel embraced by New York. I feel so free here. Nothing I do is weird to them.”

It’s the same feeling she wants to give people with Club Cheetah. Her fans may not identify with her designer shopping habits or her archival pulls, but her commitment to JT-maxxing reminds them not to let others’ perceptions box them in. “Everybody is going to be able to relate to this project,” JT promises. “I love to bring a bad-bitch confidence out of the weirdest motherf*cker.”

Top image credit: Area clothing; Messika earrings; Stylist’s own shoes.