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, co-founders of Johnson Products Company (not to be confused with Johnson & Johnson).
The couple sold Black hair 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 US stock exchange.
It wasn’t until much later that Galli started to realise that her grandfather, who died in July at 99, knew his stuff (her grandmother died in 2019).
She had just returned home from boarding school, where sports often left her hair dishevelled. 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 shared a step-by-step process for how she should be caring for her hair.
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“After that, I started to wear my hair natural,” she said. “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 personality 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 candourmaxxing.
Lounging on the floor of her living room in the East Village neighbourhood of New York City, Galli explained her philosophy on 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 five years old.
Her mother then moved her and her older sister and younger brother back to Lake Forest, Illinois; 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 Covid-19 pandemic, Galli went on to shoot for 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 okay, I’m between three things, I’m just going to post it,” she said.
She would share a variety of videos.
Zany skits recorded at her family’s home in Chicago. Outfit-of-the-day recaps and try-on hauls.
Unvarnished updates about two tumours, 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 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 to Chicago with three empty suitcases to retrieve as much as she could, she said, including pieces from Hermes and Chanel.
Galli gave me a tour of her closets, with 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 some 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 on 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.
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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.
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.
Knowing now the significance of her family’s contribution to Black Americans, she could be deeply affected by such criticism but 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.” – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
