Harry Styles.Photo:Michael Buckner/Variety via Getty
Michael Buckner/Variety via Getty
In a dazzling downtown hotel suite with glittering views across the city, a glamorous woman is nursing a glass of champagne and trying desperately to become both better known to her assembled guests — while also maintaining total anonymity.
“Hi,” she says as various reporters arrive to the suite. “I’m Deux.”It’s not her real name, of course, but for the woman who runs thepseudonymous Instagram gossip accountDeuxmoi, standing in this room in full view of others and chatting openly about her life running the cultural phenomenon is as close to a full-blown unmasking as she’s going to offer.When the Instagram account Deuxmoi first launched — over a decade ago, as a page devoted to fashion news and trends — it gained only a modest following and eventually fell dormant. Then, in March 2020, with the pandemic in full swing, the account’s founder decided to update it while bored one night with a random request: “DM me any celeb stories (first or secondhand) that you’re willing to share and I’ll post.”
She assumed she’d get a few responses about D-listers. Instead, an item about a reader’s encounter withLeonardo DiCaprioandJonah Hilllanded in her inbox which she dutifully put online. More stories followed: her DMs were soon flooded with everything from banal celebrity sightings to detailed insider information about break-ups, hook-ups, and feuds.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill.Getty
Getty
Three months after its relaunch, Deuxmoi had 400,000 followers; today, it boasts over 2 million devoted fans, with info coming in from Manhattan to Melbourne. All the while, the person behind the account has done her best to remain unknown to the masses (so much so that at one point, based on my own background in celebrity journalism, more than one person asked me if I was Deuxmoi. To which I always replied: Don’t I wish).
Those in the know practically speak their own Deuxmoi language: from references to Carbone and Via Carota (restaurants known for their celeb clientele that make frequent appearances on Deuxmoi’s Instagram stories) to their devotion to the Sunday Spotted feature (in which a cavalcade of celebrity sightings from the past week appear) to the constant request from tipsters when a new item is sent in: “Anon pls.”
It’s essentially an inside joke — and an unnecessary one — as requesting anonymity from Deux Moi is never required: “I never reveal who sends me info,” Deux says. “I even delete the juicier text threads and emails so if I’m ever hacked, people won’t know who sends me stuff.”
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Deuxmoi
There are even more extensions — Reveal Moi, an account devoted to reader guesses about Deuxmoi blind items; the podcasts Deux U and Deux Me After Dark; and a subscriber-only paid newsletter that offers deeper insider knowledge.
Still, serving as a real-life Gossip Girl is not something she wants to continue to do on her own.“I want to get away from having Deuxmoi be me — I want it to be a brand,” she says. “I don’t want to be Deuxmoi, or I don’t want Deuxmoi to be just me, I should say. That’s one of the reasons I want to stay anonymous, because I don’t want this to ever be associated with me.”Of course, that means one of the most buzzed-about media personalities in NYC at the moment can’t exactly enjoy the trappings of her fame. Making a dinner reservation at Carbone as “Deuxmoi” isn’t really an option.
Taylor Swift and Chris Evans.Taylor Hill/FilmMagic;Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty
Taylor Hill/FilmMagic;Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty
She hears about plenty of other things too, as celebrities with notoriously rabid fanbases occasionally take their frustrations out on her inbox. She notesChris EvansandTaylor Swifthave particularly intense followers, but her current battle involves the army ofHarry Stylesworshippers who turned on her after she posted that Styles had shaved his head.
“Oh my God, my DMs were his stans just ripping me apart, like, ‘It isn’t true, you’re wrong, take it back.’ They were relentless.” When a picture of a newly shorn Styles finally surfaced, Deux felt vindicated but weary: “I was like, ‘Great, can you all just leave me alone now?’”
That doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime soon.“Just the fact that I’ve been here for so long tonight, for this many hours, is something,” she says taking one more sip of champagne. “It means I’ll have DMs that are like: ‘Where are you? Why haven’t you posted? Are you OK?’ So, I guess its time to get back to work.”
source: people.com
