A Night Out With Tinx & Lucas

It’s three hours until Tinx — the TikTok advice guru, Sirius XM host, and bestselling author — makes her New York City debut in her newest job: DJ. She knows how that sounds.

“The biggest concern was people would think, ‘Oh, there’s another influencer trying to be a DJ, phoning it in or whatever,’” Tinx, whose real name is Christina Najjar, tells me. The 33-year-old and I are at the Lower East Side sushi restaurant Sake No Hana, splitting a boat-shaped platter of sushi with her besties and colleagues, including publicist Adam Riker, who her followers know as “wig.” “But then I was like, ‘I have a platform, I’m single, I’m loving life. I have a best friend who already knows how to DJ and I have this built-in audience who cares about my music tastes and will come party with me.’ So it was scary, but it made so much sense.” Wearing a pair of high-waisted, gold, sparkly briefs and a matching crop top, she looks like she was born to be in the booth.

Tinx and her DJ partner, Lucas Thomashow, who together make up the duo Tinx & Lucas, first met at The Battery, a private members’ club in San Francisco. “Everyone there’s a tech bro. But Lucas had long hair and looked really cool, so I went up to him and I was like, ‘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 short and founded the music distribution company SANA.

“We went on a few dates, but ultimately became best friends from that day,” Tinx says. The table has intuited that Tinx would like a second espresso martini, which now arrives. “Last year we were at Coachella and we were a couple drinks in,” she continues, “and we were like, ‘We should do that. We should become a DJ duo.’” (Two weeks after our dinner, Tinx & Lucas will play three Coachella party sets.)

The devotion of Tinx’s built-in audience is evident at dinner as fans stop by the table. Over the clubby background music, they thank Tinx for her dating advice, which emphasizes freeing women from the marriage and babies timeline mindest — and which she continues to dispense effortlessly.

Take Hinge roses. Is it cringe for me to send them?

“I’m the don of roses,” she says. When the dating app added them, she says, “I was like, ‘I have a choice. I can either be pissed off that all the hot guys are in ‘rose jail’ or I can put on my big girl pants, buy as many roses as I want, and send them to hot guys. It’s like a $1.49 thing and I’m like, ‘I will spend $11.99 on an oat milk latte, so I think I can [do it for a match].’”

But surely, being on Hinge is a somewhat strange experience for her, as someone now in the public eye?

Tinx admits that she declines to engage with guys who address her fame in a “cringey” way. “You know, like, ‘I’ve seen your Instagram account’ or something.” But she’s found a way to playfully nod to her online persona in her profile. One of her prompts on Hinge is “What’s your best celebrity impression? Mine is Tinx.” “I don’t know that I have it totally figured out,” she tells me later. “Sometimes I think guys think I’m trying to subliminal message them through what I say online… Don’t tell them that I am sometimes. It’s a weird third layer to contend with.”

After a tough breakup — and a period of pessimism about the state of dating apps — Tinx isn’t allowing dating to stress her out. “I’m seeing someone, but it’s very casual,” she says. “I really feel like I’ve taken back my power and am just enjoying dating so much more.”

Her only current source of anxiety is how her set downstairs at Loosie’s will go tonight. A headspace 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 to pregame.

“It’s just like the Tower of Terror,” Tinx warns me as we enter the rickety, pre-war elevator that will take us up to the penthouse party.

Playing host is Cliff Simmons, Thomashow’s best friend since his Google days, and as such, one of Tinx’s best friends as well. Inside is a swarm of A.P.C. T-shirt wearing men, a buffet of mixed drinks, and yet another one of Tinx’s besties. (She seems to live by Mindy Kaling’s code: “Best friend isn’t a person. It’s a tier.”)

Thomashow and Tinx pour drinks into Solo Cups as Simmons gives me a tour of the apartment. “They knew I’d be going all out to support them on this night however I could,” Simmons says while we take in the palatial and quintessentially male apartment, which features posters of Wedding Crashers, Dazed and Confused, and Any Given Sunday. After a quick detour to the private roof, I rejoin Tinx in the living room to talk early-aughts club culture.

“I remember growing up and reading magazines about all the cool girls going to clubs with their giant Chloé bags obstructing their faces. And I just always thought, ‘That’s where I want to be,’” she recalls. And by her teen years, Tinx — who was raised in London, where the drinking age is 18 — got herself there. “I feel like a lot of people say, ‘Oh, I was clubbing since I was 14, so I got bored of it.’ Not me. I got a taste of that sweet nectar, and I thought, ‘I’ve found my people. I’ve found my home.’ I love the connectivity, I love the togetherness.”

She spent her nights at clubs like Mahiki, where Tinx says on any given evening she’d find herself rubbing shoulders with it girls of the decade, like the members of Girls Aloud. (“It was the club of the century. They had these drinks called ‘treasure chests’ with every type of alcohol in it, and then they would pour two bottles of champagne in, too. They’d give you the worst hangover.”)

But it was perennial it girl Paris Hilton who Tinx truly worshiped. “She’s my northern star and everything that I want to be,” Tinx says of the celebutante who paved the influencer-to-DJ pipeline. “Clubbing is an important pillar in our existence. And if I can do anything to help usher in that new era of [2000s-style partying], I will do it.”

A half-hour later, and it’s time for Tinx to do just that. More Uber XLs are called, now with the West Village guys trailing us, as we head back to the Moxy Lower East Side hotel for Tinx and Thomashow’s set. “You have the USB, right?” she confirms as we pull back up to the club.

The line to get in snakes around the block, and inside, the basement dance floor is brimming with internet personalities like Girl With No Job (Claudia Oshry) and comedian Catherine Cohen. Thomashow has traded his Fendi leather jacket for a black muscle tank that shows off his Little Prince tattoo, and Tinx is still in all her pantsless glory. Blasting Afro house beats, they dance just as hard as anyone else in the club.

They’re the antithesis of the too-cool, only-here-for-the-check influencer-DJ, and it reminds me of something both silly and apt Tinx said earlier: “I always think about if aliens were arriving and they saw clubbing, they would think it’s really cool,” she says. “[They’d think], ‘The humans go to this bar, they play this music which makes them feel sexy, they drink this magical juice that also makes them feel sexy, and they rub up against each other.’”

For Tinx, it really is that primal.“I love feeling the music thrum in my ears. I love not knowing what song is going to play next,” she says. “I love catching my friend’s eyes across the bar in this moment of insane connection when our song plays. I will be partying until the day I die.”

Top Image Credits: On Tinx: Alexandre Vauthier clothing and belt, Wolford tights; On Lucas: Fendi jacket and pants, Givenchy tank top, Celine by Hedi Slimane boots

Photographs by Jade Greene

Styling by EJ Briones

Photo Director: Alex Pollack

Editor in Chief: Lauren McCarthy

SVP Fashion: Tiffany Reid

SVP Creative: Karen Hibbert