It's three hours until Tinx, the TikTok advice guru, Sirius XM host and best-selling author, makes her New York debut of her newest job: DJing. She knows what that sounds like.
“The biggest concern was that people would think, 'Oh, there's another influencer trying to be a DJ, calling it or whatever,'” Tinx, whose real name is Christina Najjar, tells me. The 33-year-old and I are at Lower East Side sushi restaurant Sake No Hana, sharing a boat-shaped sushi plate with her besties and colleagues, including publicist Adam Riker, who her fans know as a “wig”. “But then I said, 'I have a platform, I'm single, I love life. I have a best friend who already knows how to DJ and I have this built-in audience that cares about my music tastes and will come party with me. So it was scary, but it made a lot of sense.” Wearing a pair of high-waisted gold glitter shorts and a matching crop top, she looks like she was born to be on the stand.
Tinx and fellow DJ Lucas Thomashow, who together make up the duo Tinx & Lucas, first met at The Battery, a private members' club in San Francisco. “Everybody's got a tech bro. But Lucas had long hair and looked really cool, so I went up to him and said, 'Are you a DJ?'” Tinx recalls.
“I was working at Google at the time, but I was also DJing and producing,” says Thomashow, who has since cut his hair and founded music distribution company SANA.
“We went on a few dates, but we ended up becoming best friends that day,” says Tinx. The table has sensed that Tinx would like a second espresso martini, which is now arriving. “We were at Coachella last year and we had a couple of drinks,” she continues, “and we were like, 'We should do this. We should become a DJ duo.'” (Two weeks after the our dinner, Tinx and Lucas will play three Coachella party sets.)
The devotion of Tinx's built-in audience is evident at dinner as fans gather around the table. Over the club's background music, they thank Tinx for her dating advice, which she emphasizes on freeing women from the marriage-and-baby-time mindset, and which she continues to dispense effortlessly.
Take hinge roses. Does it hurt to send them?
“I'm the one from where of roses,” she says. When the dating app added them, she says, “I said, 'I have a choice. I can be mad that all the hot guys are in 'rose jail,' or I can put the big girl pants, buy as many roses as I want and send them to the hot guys. It's like a $1.49 thing and I'm like, “I'll spend $11.99 on an oatmeal latte, so I think that i can [do it for a match].'”
But surely being in the spotlight is a bit of a strange experience for her, as someone now in the public eye?
Tinx admits she refuses to hook up with guys who approach her fame in a “creepy” way. “You know, like, 'I saw your Instagram account' or something.” But he has found a way to give a nod to his online persona on his profile. One of his prompts on Hinge is “What's your best celebrity impression? Mine's Tinx. “I don't know if I've got it totally figured out,” he tells me later. “Sometimes I think guys think I'm trying to send -a subliminal message to them through what I say online… Don't tell them that sometimes I am. It's a strange third layer to contend with.”
After a tough breakup and a period of pessimism about the state of dating apps, Tinx doesn't let dating stress her out. “I'm seeing someone, but it's very casual,” she says. “I really feel like I've got my power back and I'm enjoying going out a lot more.”
His only current source of anxiety is how his downstairs setup at Loosie's will go tonight. A space for which the only antidote is… more drinks. So we all pile into an Uber XL, blast Ariana Grande's “We Can't Be Friends,” and head to the West Village for pregame.
“It's like the Tower of Terror,” Tinx warns me as we enter the wacky pre-war elevator that will take us to the penthouse party.
The host is Cliff Simmons, Thomashow's best friend from his days at Google, and as such, also one of Tinx's best friends. Inside is a swarm of APC shirts men, a buffet of mixed drinks, and yet another one of the best in Tinx. (He seems to live by Mindy Kaling's code: “A best friend isn't a person. It's a level.”)
Thomashow and Tinx pour drinks into Solo Cups while Simmons gives me a tour of the apartment. “They knew I was going to go out of my way to support them tonight in any way I could,” Simmons says as we approach the stately, quintessentially masculine apartment, which features posters of Wedding Crashers, Dazed and confusedi any sunday. After a quick detour to the private rooftop, I rejoin Tinx in the living room to discuss early club culture.
“I remember growing up and reading magazines about all the cool girls going to clubs with their giant Chloé bags blocking their faces. And I always thought, “This is where I want to be'”, he remembers. And in his teenage years, Tinx, who grew up in London, where the drinking age is 18, got there. “I feel like a lot of people say, 'Oh, I've been clubbing since I was 14, so I'm bored.' Not me. I tasted that sweet nectar and thought, 'I've found my people.' I've found my home . I love the connectivity, I love the togetherness.”
He spent his nights at clubs like Mahiki, where Tinx says on any given night he would run into the girls of the decade, such as the members of Girls Aloud. (“It was the club of the century. They had these drinks called 'treasure chests' with all kinds of alcohol, and then they'd pour in two bottles of champagne too. They'd give you the worse hangover.”)
But it was perennial girl Paris Hilton whom Tinx truly adored. “She's my north star and everything I want to be,” Tinx says of the celebrity who paved the way from influencer to DJ. “The club is an important pillar in our existence. And if I can do anything to help usher in this new era of [2000s-style partying]I will do.”
Half an hour later, and it's time for Tinx to do it. More Uber XLs are called, now with the West Village boys following us, as we head back to the Moxy Lower East Side Hotel for the Tinx and Thomashow set. “You have the USB, right?” she confirms as we head back to the club.
The line to get in snakes around the block, and inside, the basement dance floor is packed with internet personalities like Girl With No Job (Claudia Oshry) and comedian Catherine Cohen. Thomashow has swapped his Fendi leather jacket for a black muscle tank that flaunts his little prince tattoo, and Tinx is still in all his pantsless glory. With afro house beats, they dance as hard as anyone else in the club.
They're the antithesis of the too-cool influencer-DJ, just here to check, and it reminds me of something Tinx said earlier: “I always think that if aliens came and saw nightclubs, they'd think it's cool,” he says. “[They’d think]”Humans go to this bar, play this music that makes them feel sexy, drink this magical juice that also makes them feel sexy, and rub shoulders with each other.”
For Tinx, it really is that paramount. “I love hearing the music pounding in my ears. I love not knowing what song is going to play next,” he says. “I love catching my friend's eyes across the bar in that crazy moment of connection when our song comes on. I'll be partying until the day I die.”
Top image credits: A Tinx: Alexandre Vauthier clothing and belt, Wolford tights; On Lucas: Fendi jacket and trousers, Givenchy shirt, Celine boots by Hedi Slimane
Photographs by Jade Greene
style of EJ Briones
Cinematographer: Alex Pollack
Editor-in-Chief: Lauren McCarthy
SVP Fashion: Tiffany Reid
SVP Creative: Karen Hibbert
