When Olivia Joan Galli was a girl, she didn’t fully grasp that she and her siblings were hair royalty.
“There are still memories I have of my mom putting us between her legs and putting the product in our hair but not understanding that it’s my grandparents’,” she said recently in her Manhattan apartment.
Galli, 28, is a granddaughter of George and Joan Johnson, the co-founders of the Johnson Products Company. The couple sold Black hair-care products and cosmetics like Ultra Sheen and Afro Sheen, building successes in the 1950s and ’60s into the first Black-owned company to be listed on a major American stock exchange.
It wasn’t until much later that Galli started to realize that her grandfather, who died this month at 99, knew his stuff. (Her grandmother died in 2019.) She had just returned home from boarding school, where sports often left her hair disheveled. Her grandfather asked her mother when she had last washed her daughter’s hair. “I was like, ‘She doesn’t have to wash my hair anymore, Papa,’” Galli said. Johnson wasn’t convinced. “It’s dry,” he replied.
He then shared a step-by-step process for how she should be caring for her hair. “After that, I started to wear my hair natural,” she added. “I used to straighten my hair or keep it in a bun, but never down. I think after that conversation I was like, ‘Why am I hiding it?’”
Galli, now a fashion influencer and photographer, has since freed herself in other ways. Sprinkled into her feed among outfit-of-the-day videos and highlights from brand trips are posts of occasionally shocking honesty. Rashes, fresh breakups, new boyfriends, nepo baby allegations: All are fair game on Galli’s TikTok page, where more than 300,000 followers tune in for her fashion flexing and candormaxxing.
Lounging on the floor of her living room in the East Village, Galli explained her philosophy when it comes to creating online content.
“I’m not going to be fake on the internet for people’s approval,” she said. “If they’re going to follow me, they’re going to see the real me, and I’m not going to hide that.”
She allowed there might be another explanation for her ease with letting it all hang out. “I’m on Lexapro now,” she said with a laugh.
Galli was born in Chicago and raised in Buenos Aires — her father is from Argentina — until she was about 5. Her mother then moved her and her two siblings, an older sister and a younger brother, back to their home in Lake Forest, Ill.; her parents divorced a few years later. When it came time for college, Galli attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for a year before transferring to the Parsons School of Design in New York to pursue photography.
After graduating in 2020 in the thick of the coronavirus pandemic, Galli went on to shoot for several publications, including Vogue, Refinery29 and The New York Times. She started posting on TikTok around that time as well. One of her first videos was a response to not hearing back from her friends quickly enough when she needed help selecting an outfit for a date.
“I had seen people on TikTok posting like, ‘help me pick out my outfit,’ and I was like OK, I’m between three things, I’m just going to post it,” she said.
She would share a variety of videos online from that point. Zany skits recorded at her family’s home in Chicago. Outfit-of-the-day recaps and try-on hauls. Unvarnished updates about two separate tumors, one in her ovary, the other in a toe. Clips featuring ex-boyfriends that, perhaps surprisingly, were not immediately archived. More than a few sponsored posts.
But her content shifted after she learned in 2022 that her grandfather, who had remarried that same year, was planning to sell the remainder of her late grandmother’s vintage designer wardrobe to the RealReal.
These garments hadn’t already been snagged by Galli’s mother and other members of her family, so Galli dropped everything and flew from New York to Chicago with three empty suitcases to retrieve as much as she could, she said, including pieces from Hermès and Chanel.
During my visit, she gave a tour of her closets, featuring hanging rods heavy with dozens of luxury pieces, including a 2002 Prada silk coat, a gold Norell-Tessell gown her grandmother wore to the White House in the 1990s and several designer shoes and accessories.
Galli said she had long admired her grandmother’s sense of style, captured in glamorous photos of her beaming at galas and stepping out of a jet, and appreciated her advice when it came to dressing. (“You can’t give up on a piece of clothing just because it doesn’t fit you the way that you imagined it to,” Galli remembered her grandmother instructing her. “You get it tailored first.”)
In 2022, she began showing off some of the pieces she had saved from consignment, not telling her followers at first who her grandmother was or what her family was known for. After users did their own sleuthing and her engagement took off, she posted a video explaining her grandparents’ claim to fame. The comments were mostly positive, she said, with some users sharing their experience using Johnson hair products back in the day or even working for the company at one point.
The only time the comments skewed negative, she recalled, was when someone would take issue with her dating someone white or Asian. “They were always like, ‘How could you disrespect your grandparents’ legacy by dating outside of your race?’” she said. “I think that was always heartbreaking because it’s like, you love who you love.”
To Galli, whose family has never owned Johnson Products during her lifetime — her grandmother sold the company in 1993 — the family business was never especially front of mind when she was growing up. But knowing the significance of her family’s contribution to Black Americans, such criticism could affect her deeply. But she tries not to let it bother her, Galli said.
“I feel like there’s large weight sometimes, to try to not only continue on in my grandparents’ legacy and show them respect, but then also show the Black community respect,” she said. “I think there aren’t that many Black content creators that have really tapped into the high-end luxury market, and I take a lot of responsibility to always represent positively.”
She’s also aware of some social media users’ fixation on what they see as her privilege.
“I come from a really incredible family, but I don’t think that that’s the reason why I’ve gotten any success,” she said. “I did inherit my grandma’s clothing, but that can just be like anyone’s family.”
Galli is currently gearing up for a grueling — if frequently glamorous — few months, including brand collaborations with Skims and Cadillac, surgery to remove the tumor in her toe, and appearances at Paris and Copenhagen Fashion Weeks.
She said there had been moments where her health issues and grief made it difficult to get out of bed, but then she remembered how her grandparents had urged her to keep moving forward.
“My grandfather and my grandmother were both like, ‘You can’t cry — don’t cry over me,’” she said. “When the time comes, don’t waste your tears. Just continue to live your life, because you have the opportunity to do so.”
