This time last year Olandria Carthen was sitting at a desk inside a corporate office building in Houston, probably on a Teams call staring at her own face. I should not be selling elevators, she’d think. It has to be better.
Indeed, the woman we now know as Bama Barbie, with more than 2.2 million followers on Instagram and 1.7 million on TikTok, once spent her days selling elevators and escalators before she went to Fiji to film one of the biggest reality TV shows of 2025, and probably ever. Carthen was good at her job, make no mistake—but she knew “dealing with pissed-off customers every day” just wasn’t it.
Meanwhile, some 7,000 miles and an ocean away, Nicolas Vansteenberghe (1.9 million on Instagram, 2.5 million on TikTok) was in Japan, eating ramen and snowboarding while working as a model. “I was making enough money to travel and do what I wanted, but I felt like I had no purpose, just partying and vacationing—no future plan, just going with the flow,” he says.
To think, just 12 months later they’d be collectively known as Nicolandria, arguably television’s most talked-about couple of 2025, who can’t go out in public in New York City without being swarmed by fans. I know this because my first pitch for our meeting—a festive hot chocolate outing in the heart of Manhattan—was politely but swiftly turned down by their management teams for that very reason.
Celebrities often spend their whole careers vying for the visibility these two have, and yet to call them household names would be misleading. One has to wonder: How did this happen?
Emma Anderson
During the course of six weeks this past summer (every day but hump day), viewers watched their individual journeys unfold on season seven of Love Island USA—having an initial attraction to one another but ultimately coupling up with other people; watching those relationships play out; becoming friends; almost getting eliminated and having to come together in order to stay in the villa; going back to other connections; and, following some more twists and turns, finding their way to each other. By the finale, NBC Universal announced the season had amassed 18.4 billion minutes streamed on Peacock, making it the #1 streaming reality show in the U.S. during its entire run.
They might’ve been disconnected “from the outside” while in Fiji, but those of us watching the action unfold from home clocked their chemistry pretty much from the jump. The moniker Nicolandria, in fact, was given to them by the fans and had been embraced by everyone from celebrities to their families before word even reached them in the villa. Some viewers cried “producer intervention” when they finally came together (which the couple has repeatedly refuted), but ultimately, their relationship was just that compelling—a friends-to-lovers arc, a better-than-fan-fiction love story playing out in real time, on our screens. He was giddy around her, attentive and fiercely protective; she was able to loosen up with him, letting her humor shine. They might’ve come in second place on the show, but they won what mattered.
Read the full article here
