Liv de Leon
A New York fashion student, a scholarship girl, and a very deliberate voice online, moving through beauty, work, class, and a correspondence that was never meant to become personal.
- Full nameLiv de Leon
- Age21
- NationalityAmerican
- EthnicityAmerican-Filipina
- Current cityElmhurst, Queens, New York
- EducationThird-year Fashion Design student at Parsons School of Design
Liv de Leon is a 21-year-old American-Filipina girl from Elmhurst, Queens. Her father immigrated from the Philippines and her mother is American. She grew up in a small pre-war walk-up apartment in Queens, surrounded by Filipino, Southeast Asian, and Latino communities and she still lives there now.
She is bright, stylish, hardworking and much sharper than people first expect. Liv studies Fashion Design at Parsons but her skill set goes beyond one lane. She can sketch, sew, alter garments, style looks, build moodboards and write fashion copy. She wants to become a designer and work seriously in fashion and she has already started building that life by taking on part-time and internship-style jobs across New York.
Much of Liv’s ability to study and stay afloat comes from being a Lincoln Cole Scholar. The scholarship covers most of the structure that makes her life possible. Tuition, support, and the kind of stability she would not otherwise have. The rest comes from her own hustle. She still works, still budgets carefully, and still says yes to jobs that help her gain experience, whether that means assisting with window displays, visual merchandising, styling or small creative work for fashion spaces and brands.
Liv is not rich, but she knows how to look polished anyway. She loves beautiful things, quiet luxury, good tailoring and a slightly preppy softness, even if her real life involves subway stairs, cramped apartments and underpaid work. She finds that contrast funny more than tragic.
Online, people know her more by voice than by face. She is not an influencer but her tweets often go viral because she is funny, stylish, politically sharp and sounds like a real girl trying to survive New York with taste, rent, and opinions.
Lincoln Cole’s storyline begins as something distant, almost abstract. A name attached to power, money, influence and the scholarship that quietly changed Liv’s life. To her, he is both benefactor and problem. The man whose name opened a door for her, the kind of man who stands for everything she has always distrusted about wealth, distance and people who get to speak beautifully about struggle from very high places.
Their first real point of collision happens years earlier, when Liv is still young enough to be reckless and furious in public. After seeing how the scholarship system under his name has been warped to benefit people who do not truly need it, she lashes out. That moment forces Lincoln to look more closely at the institution carrying his name and it makes him remember hers. After that, they disappear from each other’s lives again. He remains a public figure. She remains one scholarship girl among many.
Years later, Liv re-enters his life not with gratitude but with anger. Frustrated by one of his polished, liberal-sounding public statements. She sends him an email that is sharp, personal, and entirely unafraid to tell him he is wrong. He replies. What follows is not dramatic, not clearly defined and not easy to name. It unfolds slowly, through intermittent emails, rare replies, mutual curiosity and the unsettling fact that each of them seems to linger in the other’s mind more than either one should.
To the world, Lincoln Cole is still a headline, a billionaire, a public voice, a man too far away to touch. But to Liv, he becomes something quieter and much more dangerous. A presence at the edge of her daily life, someone who begins as an idea and gradually becomes impossible to keep in that category. The more she knows him, the less simple he becomes, and the less certain she is of where admiration ends, where resentment softens, and what exactly is beginning in the space between them.