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New Yorkers finally got to meet our soon-to-be first lady, Rama Duwaji, Tuesday.
The 28-year-old artist, who was completely absent during her husband Zohran Mamdani’s successful bid to take the city’s top job, has declined most media but said yes to a cover shoot with The Cut.
And no wonder. The magazine fawned over her as both a style icon and an independent woman.
But, more than anything, this profile underscores her youth.
She’s a Gen Z’er who gushes about being in “platonic love” with her friends and how they discuss if “Usher is hot or not.”
The icebreaker she used to ask on dates: “What kind of fruit would you be and why?”
Previously, she’d say she was a “sweet and tart” raspberry. But after a mayoral election where she was, really, treated with kid gloves by the media, Duwaji’s a lychee: “slightly hardened shell but still open and soft on the inside.”
As for any insight into her husband’s platform, we only learn that she and Mamdani are “focused on protein right now. Don’t sleep on cottage cheese. Put some chives on it — it’s really good.”
Born in Houston and raised in New Jersey and Dubai, Duwaji has little life experience and even less experience in New York City. Like many of the people who voted for her husband, she’s a recent transplant, having moved to the Big Apple in 2021.
What she has is a sense of personal style that’s arty and hip. She’s attractive in an offbeat way and makes for a striking model in dark clothing with exaggerated silhouettes, even if some of the outfits look like they’re from the closet of a cartoon villain.
Though I respect Duwaji’s ability to pull off a “bixie” (a bob-pixie combo), The Cut’s writer’s assertion that women are asking hairstylists for “the Rama” is, surely, overstated.
More understated is Duwaji’s approach to her new role as first lady. Her “top priority” will be to help undiscovered artists “make it in the city.” OK.
Not that she isn’t interested in politics. Just not so much the issues of New York City.
“Speaking out about Palestine, Syria, Sudan — all these things are really important to me … It feels fake to talk about anything else when that’s all that’s on my mind, all I want to put down on paper,” she says.
“Everything is political.”
Mamdani is quoted in the piece, too, revealing that when he got serious about running for mayor, Duwaji told him, “100 percent go for it.” But when it comes to the attention — and yes, some online trolling — she’s received, he said, “She did not sign up for this.”
Except she did. This is what it means to be a public figure in 2025. No matter what side of the aisle a politician occupies, their spouse is a fair target.
Even if Duwaji did make herself so scarce on the campaign trail, choosing to let her portfolio of nakedly political art speak for her.
The Cut bizarrely admonishes the acknowledgement of her art’s messaging.
“Her work has attracted its share of haters, too, like New York Post reporters who accuse her of using her art to ‘rage against US imperialism’ and express sympathy to ‘notorious terrorist propagandists,'” the piece states.
But reporting on what she’s explicitly said on social media is not hate.
On Instagram, Duwaji has expressed sorrow over the death of Hamas propagandaist Saleh Al-Jafarawi , known as Mr. FAFO. She’s posted her own artwork, inscribed with messages like “American imperialism never changes.”
Duwaji said her messages are “misconstrued,” but offered no alternative explanation for her words.
“I stopped trying to control how people perceive the work that I do,” she said. “People just see what they want to see.”
But really, people see what you write and say.
As for the couple’s upcoming move to historic Gracie Mansion, Duwaji is a poor pitiful Pearl of a victim.
“Duwaji will now have for neighbors some of the very people who have lobbed the loudest accusations of antisemitism and the baldest Islamophobic attacks on her husband,” the writer says.
I assume that’s a reference to New Yorkers who were offended by his unwillingness to denounce the phrase “Globalize the intifada.”
But her husband has assured us that he wants to be a mayor for all New Yorkers.
“Duwaji takes a breath, pausing when I ask her about becoming an Upper East Sider, and then deflates,” the story continues. “It’ll be fine,” our first lady-to-be says.
It feels petulant and ungrateful.
I only hope that, after her husband tries to implement his pie-in-the-sky socialist platform, New Yorkers can say the same: That we’ll be fine.
English (US)