When Larissa Mills first became a TikTok sensation, all of her videos—or rather her daughter Ella Potter’s videos—started the same way. “Outfit of the day,” Potter would prompt Mills, who would then describe the details of what she was wearing. “Shoes?” she’d ask. “Vejas,” Mills would answer. Then the pair would swap and Mills would ask Potter the same thing. Their neatly curated New England home served as the perfect backdrop—vaulted ceilings in Mills’s bedroom and honeycomb tiles on her bathroom floor complemented her looks. The pair did beauty tutorials, sorted through each other’s closets, packed for trips together, and shared other warm and inviting snippets of their life.
TikTok content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
When I first saw Mills on TikTok in April of 2022, I immediately showed my mom. Explaining her outfit of the day with Potter, it wasn’t just her effortless sense of style that reminded me of my own mother, but the apparent and genuine connection she and her daughter shared.
“There was this trend, where you’d show your mom’s kitchen pantry, and Ella decided to do it,” Mills recently told Vanity Fair. “I was running out the door and she just said, ‘Come here, let’s do this.’ And the video just blew up, people asking, ‘What is your mom wearing?’ and asking to do an OOTD with me.”
Social media writ large is saturated with influencers telling followers where to shop and what to buy, so it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what makes a creator resonate. But for Mills, it’s undoubtedly the straightforwardness of her content: Onscreen, it’s simply Mills, and that’s enough. Her impeccable taste, which leans toward timeless rather than trendy, speaks for itself.
It would be cliché to call Mills an unlikely influencer. At 52, and a mother of two with a successful professional life, she certainly never had plans to become the social media personality she is today. There are plenty of women of all ages making a name for themselves on TikTok, to the point where it almost feels as if we’ve come full circle: content creators showcasing how you can still be stylish at any age can feel like perpetuating the stereotype that, if you’re in your 40s, 50s, and 60s, you have stopped caring about your appearance.
“People always say age is not a number,” she says. “But then, in their hashtags, it will say #fashionover50.” Though she’s aware her age impacts how audiences interact with her content (she jokes, “It’s okay, you can be, like, this old lady made it big on TikTok. It’s totally fine,”), what sets Mills apart is that her content isn’t about her age, it’s about who she is at this moment in her life, which yes, happens to be a woman over 50, but that’s hardly what makes her worth watching.
Courtesy of Larissa Mills.
Born and raised in New England, Mills met her husband, Todd, at Trinity College in Connecticut. The pair have two children, Ella and Henry, and reside in Massachusetts now. “I was always interested in makeup and fashion,” she tells me, “But I never felt like it could be a real career.” She spent time working in PR, and, briefly, as a buyer for Bergdorf Goodman. Later, after a few friends asked her to help with their makeup, she fell into makeup artistry on a freelance basis before returning to marketing, PR, and working in education while her children were in school. She struggled with the pressures of feeling like she had to do something serious; the stigma of vacuity that can be attached to working in fashion looming large.
Mills’s role as a style influencer is almost poetic in that way. After years of charting a professional path without fully embracing her love of fashion, it was her daughter who reminded her of her affinity for style. Her contentment is infectious; both in our conversation and her online presence, it’s apparent she enjoys what she’s doing.
After that initial pantry video went viral, things started to really take off. When brands started reaching out, Mills says, that’s when it hit her. “So then it seemed a little bit more real,” she says. “And it was enticing that, wow, we could do this. This is kind of fun. We could do it together.”