Two Nights for One Direction

The teenage fans behind the boy band of the moment

Thousands of teenage girls, with a few tired parents sprinkled among them, are huddled in line at 1:30 a.m. waiting for a free One Direction concert on the Today Show in November of last year. Mili Rodriguez is one of those girls. At 15, she is tall and slim with honey-hued hair, and wears a white fleece onesie with multicolored hearts. She and her best friend Victoria Rodriguez, 14 (no relation) had now been waiting for 36 straight hours. “I did not choose the fangirl life,” Mili said, “the fangirl life chose me.” Propped beside her on the cold concrete, Victoria, who is tan and wears her chestnut brown hair straight and long, nodded in agreement and fiddled with the zipper on her light pink onesie.

Mili and Victoria are super fans of One Direction, a British boy band formed in 2010 on the music competition TV show, The X-Factor, and refer to themselves as “Directioners.” Since finishing third on the show, One Direction racked up an impressive fan following, particularly on social media. There are countless Tumblr blogs devoted to the boys — Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson—who range in age from nineteen to twenty-one.

It hasn’t been long since the apex of One Direction mania, and the band is back in the spotlight—they’re on the covers of Glamour, Teen Vogue and British GQ. Their 3D movie, One Direction: This is Us will be out August 30, and the fans are chomping at the bit.

Fan dedication to a band is nothing new—think “Beatlemania” from the 1960s and Bieber Fever in 2011. One Direction fandom is similar, but for one factor: the Internet. Through social media and various blogs, Directioners around the world have been able to connect with one another in real time and keep track of the band’s movements thanks to active Twitter accounts and paparazzi shots uploaded online.

Victoria and Mili, the teen Directioners, were both born in Uruguay and live in Kearny, NJ. They each have a Tumblr and a Twitter devoted to One Direction, and spend around three hours per night—“until midnight or earlier or later whenever we decide to go to sleep,” says Victoria—clicking through other fan Tumblrs, checking Google News for updates, browsing their Twitter feeds, and searching for new photos and animated GIFs so they can save them on their computer desktops.

At 8:30 the night before the concert, Victoria and Mili were ensconced behind police barricades around the corner from Rockefeller Plaza, on 48th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. At that point they had been waiting for over 24 hours, sleeping on the sidewalk the night before for barely an hour. When I met them, they were giddy with excitement—after all, there were less than 12 hours remaining until the concert—and walked me through the wristband system that the Today Show had set up. Purple was first, then pink, then green, and white was VIP. The girls had pink.

As they were explaining the system to me, a group of girls walked up to them. “How long have you been waiting here? Do you have wristbands?” they asked. They became fast friends with all the other Directioners, comparing wristbands and sharing stories from the previous night—or nights, for some girls had been waiting in line since Friday.

At that point a policeman ambled up. “What’s this about?”

The girls explained they were waiting for One Direction, and when the policeman, who declined to have his name in print, expressed confusion, they started to sing to jog his memory. “Baby you light up my world like nobody else, the way that you flip your hair gets me overwhelmed…”

Shaking his head, the policeman left and the girls resumed their conversation, discussing the whereabouts of the band. They had heard that some band members were attending Justin Bieber’s concert at the Barclay’s center in Brooklyn. But according to some fans on Twitter, Zayn was still at the hotel, so they were thinking of heading there in the hopes of spotting him.

I chimed in. “I was there an hour ago, and there are a lot of people waiting around back, by the garage.” The girls looked at me, puzzled—I was not dressed like a Directioner, as I wasn’t wearing a branded or homemade shirt, bag, or sneakers, and furthermore I was furiously scribbling everything down. I explained that I was there to experience the fan frenzy, and they showered me with One Direction facts: “Niall loves eating,” “Louis is the funny one,” “All together, they have 64 tattoos!”—just as the policeman returned.

“Have you girls heard of Queen? Led Zeppelin? Pink Floyd?” he asked. Some girls nodded, some shook their heads. “The Beatles?”

“They say One Direction’s going to be bigger than The Beatles,” countered Mili. To be fair, One Direction has made a mark in the music history books as the only British band to have their first two albums debut at the top of the U.S. charts. And again, to be fair, One Direction only has two albums.

The policeman laughed. “Someone’s been smoking crack.…”

Mili looked at Victoria, her eyebrows raised. “My mom understands how much this means to me,” she said. “You don’t.”

“Sure, when I was your age….”

Victoria butted in defiantly. “Dinosaurs existed.”

After the policemen left, Victoria and Mili discussed the practicalities of pavement living. They needed dinner, Victoria’s phone needed charging, and Victoria’s parents would be there soon to pick up their extra blankets, leaving them just with their backpacks and home made signs. Victoria’s sign was green, with orange cut-out bubble letters: “I love my boys how I love my tea, hot and British with some Irish creame.” It alluded to the fact that four members of the band were British, while one, Niall Horan, was Irish. She realized that “cream” was misspelled, but didn’t want to ruin the poster by ripping off the “e.” Mili’s sign was a yellow triptych, reading, “1 Galaxy, 9 Planets, 240 Countries, 809 Islands, 7 Billion People, and my heart belongs to 1 Direction.” Magazine cutouts of the boys were pasted to the right of the words.

While stowing the signs next to the barricade, they said that there would be a poster contest—during the concert, the band would pick out their three favorite posters from the crowd, then the fans who had made those posters would participate in a trivia contest. The winner would get free tickets to the Madison Square Garden concert on December 3. Mili and Victoria wanted those tickets.

“Basically, One Direction over everything,” Mili said as she sat in a blue folding camp chair left by two fans, now friends of the girls, who had gone to wait at the boys’ hotel for them to return from the aforementioned concert.

I asked Mili what she meant. She responded, “I know the fangirl life…” she trailed off.

Victoria, sitting cross-legged on a blanket beside her, picked up. “It’s like, you know…”

Mili shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t even know how to explain it.”

“You dedicate part of your life to them,” Victoria said, trying to make me understand.

“Their breathing makes you happy,” Mili emphasized.

Victoria rounded it out with a sigh. “Being in the same city as them is amazing.”

They prepared to go to McDonald’s for a bite and an outlet, and I made plans to meet up with them afterwards. I told them I wanted to meet more fans to decipher One Direction’s appeal. Victoria and Mili assured me that the fandom was friendly and anyone would be happy to speak with me.

“We made friends with half of the people here,” Victoria said. Mili added, “It’s funny because we don’t know them, yet we understand them so much.” I left Mili and Victoria after exchanging numbers and Twitter handles—Mili explained that she didn’t have a phone because of a freak accident. She had been watching the Olympics’ opening ceremony on television in July and when One Direction appeared on the screen, she shrieked and tossed her phone in the air. It broke.

I walked over to Fifth Avenue, unprepared for what I was to witness—hordes of girls behind police barricades, smushed together in piles of pink blankets, rainbow-colored signs, teen magazines and empty pizza boxes. The sidewalks were thickly blocked for two blocks, and one fan explained that most people in the line didn’t have wristbands and weren’t guaranteed a spot at the concert. Those with wristbands would be admitted at two a.m. to line up for the concert. It was now half past nine the night before.

I didn’t have to go far to find a group of fans proclaiming themselves the biggest Directioners present. A group of six girls aged 10 to 12, they were kitted out in One Direction tee shirts and the accoutrements of a tween today: multicolored painted nails, light pink hair streaks, and wristfuls of jelly bracelets emblazoned with One Direction “inside jokes” taken from the band’s various video diaries, all on YouTube, from their time on the X Factor and on tour.

The group of girls wanted to put on their own concert and went all out, singing and dancing, waving their hands in the air and gripping their tee shirts printed with the boys’ faces. “Let’s go crazy, crazy, crazy, ‘til we see the sun, I know we only met but let’s pretend it’s love…”

They took turns explaining why One Direction was so appealing. Christen Crowley, 10 (but turning 11 in six days, she pointed out) got the ball rolling. “One Direction is the best band in the whole world… they don’t use autotune.” Her sister, Grace Crowley, 12, jumped in. “One Direction are hot. And they have accents, which makes them even hotter.”

The appeal of One Direction is the same as it is for many pop bands: the boys are a talented and exceptionally attractive group of singers. But they were created on-screen on a reality competition show, so their rise was more discernable than that of other bands who group together before the public takes note of them. With a few clicks on YouTube, you can find clips of their first auditions, the moment Simon Cowell formed them into a group, their performances, and yes, their ever-popular video diaries, where the boys goof off on camera and urge viewers to vote for them on the show so that they can stay on for one more week. In their video diary from Week 6 on the X Factor, the entire band wore onesies—hence Victoria and Mili’s decision to wear onesies to wait in line for the concert.

When I returned to Mili and Victoria, I found them with Victoria’s mother, father and sister, who were preparing to leave them for the night. Victoria’s mother, who spoke only Spanish, had stayed with them the previous night but felt comfortable leaving them because they wouldn’t be alone. Victoria’s 20-year-old sister, Vanessa, said that her sister’s obsession was a little crazy sometimes. Her mother agreed, but added that it was better to be obsessed with One Direction than to be out partying and trying out drugs and alcohol, as high schoolers are apt to do.

Around 10 p.m., Victoria’s family left, piling into their taupe truck to drive back home to Kearny, New Jersey. Victoria and Mili immediately filled me in what I had missed. “People came who haven’t been here and they were like, you’re the ones with the onesies!” said Victoria.

“We’re famous!” Mili said with a smirk. Because of their getups, the girls had been on several different television segments on NBC and MSNBC. “We’re known as The Onesies,” they boasted, and told me that their mothers had seen them on TV.

But then the conversation turned to something more pressing: the location of the boys. “They have to move hotels,” Victoria told me, “Zayn was in a car and a fan threw herself on it.” I shuddered, and Victoria and Mili shook their heads as if to express that this, this was going too far in the name of fandom. As Mili and Victoria chattered on, we heard footsteps growing louder. One girl ran past us, then ten, then twenty. “What’s going on?” Mili yelled.

“I don’t know!” a fan shouted back, frantically trying to keep up with the pack. This wasn’t the first time this had happened. With Twitter, false rumors started by the minute. In this case, a fan claimed to have spotted one of the boys somewhere—enough to cause a stampede of girls desperate for a look, a hug or a picture.

Victoria checked Twitter to find the incriminating tweet, but was unable to locate it with a quick glance. She instead found a photo to show me. “We had a party to celebrate their two-year anniversary,” she said, “It was just us two.” Mili nodded, saying that they played their favorite songs and danced. The photo was of a round cake, half iced with the design of the British flag, half with the Irish flag to represent the Irish member of the band, Niall. The letters “ONE DIRECTION” were squeezed out in black icing on the center of the cake, with a thick candle in the shape of a number two above it. Around the perimeter were candles spelling out “CONGRATULATIONS.”

A couple of minutes later, I saw a tweet appear on my newsfeed and passed my phone to the girls. It said that Harry Styles was in Times Square, just one long block and one short block away from our setup. What happened next came as no surprise to me, having now spent some time in the company of Directioners.

“Harry is in Times Square!” squealed a girl running past us, part of a flock of screaming tweens. Mili sprang up and leapt around the police barricade to join the girls. “Sorry, I’m leaving now!”

Victoria, though, stayed. She explained her logic to me. “Harry knows how it is. He’ll take a photo [with a fan] then the fan will post it on Twitter and say Harry is in Times Square. Everyone will go and then his security guard will make him leave.” While talking, she remained glued to her phone, scrolling down with her thumb. “I’m just checking Twitter. Soon people will be like, ‘Aw, Harry is leaving,’ and I’ll be like ‘See?’” She shrugged.

One Direction’s rise has been rapid, and in interviews, the boys respond positively to their newfound fans. In Teen Vogue, Zayn Malik said, “Some call our fans crazy. I call them passionate,” but this belies the fact that having rabid fans isn’t always pleasant. The night before the Today Show concert, Liam Payne urged fans to be calm, tweeting, “I do really appreciate your support and love you all but sometimes it all gets too crazy for me.”

Mili returned twenty minutes later, at 11 p.m. She said that Harry had indeed been in Times Square, but the group had missed him by just a few minutes. Her eyes misted. “I ran so far! I didn’t see him!” she said.

Victoria was yawning and Mili was rubbing at her eyes. It was time for a Starbucks run.

We walked quickly to the nearest branch and studied the menu. The goal was to choose something with maximum caffeine – after all, the girls were looking at their second all-nighter, and would be running on no more than their own anticipation. Victoria pointed at the menu board and Mili giggled. “What is it?” I asked.

“Orange mango, Harry’s favorite,” Victoria answered. That, I thought, was the mark of true fandom. These girls always had One Direction on the mind, even when doing something as mundane as ordering a black coffee. But this was a special night for the girls, and fewer than eight hours remained until the performance.

When we returned to the line, the girls told me about their time in high school. Both were cheerleaders and liked school, but they noted that many of their friends couldn’t understand their obsession with the musicians, which they distinguished from a calmer admiration of the music itself. “I really don’t like to mention One Direction in school,” Mili said, “because there’s always that person who’ll make that stupid comment…”

I asked what she meant. “Like ‘Ew, they’re gay!’” Mili said. “And then you ask them what’s wrong with being gay, and they’re like, ‘Umm…’”

“Or people say it’s just because they are cute,” Victoria added, snickering. “Yeah, because I buy the album to listen to their faces. It makes no sense.”

At midnight, two trendily dressed girls, Sara Lopez and Gabby Caceres, sauntered up to us. Both 18 and from Astoria, Queens, they had met Mili and Victoria the previous day and had left the girls the camp chairs. “We met Liam and Niall!” they sang out, saying that waiting outside their hotel for six hours had finally paid off. They also brought news that Today show staffers were starting to line people up by wristband color, two hours earlier than the original time the girls had been given. Without a moment’s thought, Mili and Victoria picked up their knapsacks and onesies and hoofed it to the middle of Rockefeller Center. I was barely able to keep up.

We slipped into the barricaded area for pink wristbands—no one checked my wrist, which was bare—and met a new group of girls. They had now been living on the sidewalk for days and had dark circles under their eyes, but energy was high and camaraderie instantaneous. Lexi Hewitt-Park, a 14-year-old girl from DC, breathed deeply as if to savor all the new friendships she had made. “I think it’s so cool, we all get each other,” she sighed. “We can make a One Direction joke and everybody gets it.”

The air was thick with chatter, and by then I felt I had heard every possible tidbit of gossip about the boys, and listened to almost as many lyrics. By 1 a.m., Mili and Victoria’s eyes were slowly shutting, but their eyes opened up enough to start a sing-a-long that roused around 15 of the girls sitting around them. “I’m broken, do you hear me? I’m blinded, ‘cause you are everything I see.”

The lyrics, from the band’s song “More Than This,” fit the situation perfectly.

Less than a week later, I went to see the girls in their homes in New Jersey, and listened to them reminisce about the concert to me, to which I had been refused admission because I didn’t have a wristband. They had been close enough to see the boys, but complained about the Today Show’s handling of the event, because the closest spots went to friends and family of staffers rather than to the fans who had spent days waiting in line for the concert.

Mili’s bedroom was covered in One Direction posters, one wall devoted to tiny photos arranged in a collage, while another was filled with larger posters from teen magazines. She had drawn quotes from the band’s videos on her door, along with a colorful poster reading “June 2, 2010, 8:22 p.m.”—the exact time the band was formed.

Sitting on Mili’s bed, the girls mulled over all the time they spent on their fangirl lifestyle. Recently, they had been interacting online with fans they had connected with at the concert, sharing favorite moments and plans to see the boys in the future. And as for those who don’t understand their obsession? “I compare it to other things they like so much, like sports,” Mili said matter-of-factly.

“How they feel about that, that’s how I feel about One Direction,” Victoria continued, and wrapped up the discussion with a dash of her trademark sass. “The one comment I get the most is, ‘Why do you like them so much? They don’t know you exist.’ And I’m like, ‘Why do you breathe? You know you’re going to die anyways.’” She shook her head. “It makes no sense.”