One Direction superfans are traveling hours to go to this smoothie shop outside of Scranton

TAYLOR, Pa. — Just under five miles outside of Scranton sits a shrine to Gen-Z girlhood that has One Direction fans from 50 states and 13 countries making pilgrimages to sip smoothies under the gaze of a life-size Harry Styles cutout.

Lucca Fresca is a TikTok-famous smoothie shop known equally for its milkshake-thick açai bowls and One Direction-themed menu. Owner Mattia Krappa, 24, is a Lackawanna County native who grew up shuffling between her parents’ restaurants and a multitude of boy band concerts.

When Krappa opened the smoothie shop in December 2020, the business became a manifestation of her foremost loves: Harry Styles and the greater One Direction universe, Taylor Swift, and frothy pop culture phenomena from Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour to Stranger Things.

At Lucca Fresca, every table is Mod-Podged with collages of 1D memorabilia — ticket stubs, magazine spreads, photos from a collectible yearbook. An oversize photo of the band presides over a cozy couch. The shop’s best seller is a dual-toned strawberry and blue raspberry concoction named the ”Fine Line” after Styles’ sophomore album. It, of course, is served in a cup plastered with a sticker of the singer.

“It looks like a teen girl threw up in here,” Krappa said. “If you splattered me on the walls, it would look exactly like this.”

When local Directioner-slash-influencer Carmella Condon posted a TikTok with more than 46,000 views that dubbed Lucca Fresca the “Harry Styles cafe,” Krappa became the creator of a nostalgic and permanent fandom experience. She also inadvertently built a safe space for women and girls who’ve spent the majority of their lives online being ridiculed for loving things too fiercely and loudly.

“People are coming from far away just to experience a little piece of One Direction, a little piece of Harry,” said Krappa. “My job is just to make it worth their while.”

The legacy of One Direction — the British boy band formed on The X Factor in 2010 — are the now-adult women who spent their teenage years turning the group into superstars. Their obsessive video-streaming, outfit cataloging, and fan fiction have arguably helped shape what it means to be a fan in the internet age, where devotion is represented by a delicate mixture of late stage capitalism, unwavering loyalty, and arts and crafts.

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Unless you meet your idol, being a superfan can be thankless, which is why spaces like these matter — at least according to Amelia Yahawk, who stopped at Lucca Fresca on the way home to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., after driving three hours to see Louis Tomlinson perform in Philadelphia in July.

“Men can go to a hockey bar and scream at a TV and people won’t say anything about how crazy that looks, but people get so down on girls for liking things,” Yahawk said.

Krappa’s love of boy bands powers her entrepreneurial spirit, two things she said her parents — Lehigh Valley restaurateurs who own Lucca, the Italian restaurant next to Krappa’s smoothie shop — nurtured.

When Krappa graduated from East Stroudsburg University during the pandemic with a marketing degree and “42 rejection emails from a bunch of different companies,” her parents offered her the space next to Lucca to build her own business.

Krappa started documenting the renovation process on TikTok in 2020, with her initial following coming from DIYers amused by her difficulty building a couch, not Directioners.

The Styles paraphernalia came gradually, said Krappa: Friends would give her vinyl, rare T-shirts, and other knickknacks to congratulate her on opening up shop. Menu items got more referential — “Sunflower” for a pale orange smoothie inspired by the Styles ditty “Sunflower Vol. 6,” “All the Love” for a strawberry bowl influenced by how Styles signs his autographs.

Krappa dubbed July, when 1D was formed in 2010, One Direction Month at Lucca Fresca. For 31 days, the smoothie shop was replete with extra special boy band programming, from screenings of the group’s documentary to hosting the band’s old touring drums.

“It’s so comfortable here, said Yahawk. “Everything is so Harry-coded.”

Lucca Fresca has turned Krappa into a minor fandom celebrity in her own right. She gets recognized at concerts, and people plan their vacations around a pit stop for a smoothie.

“My first international customer was this family from Israel, and the dad told me the itinerary had four stops: New York City, Niagara Falls, Boston, and Lucca Fresca,” Krappa said. “I want people to feel like they can be whoever they want here, that this is their safe space.”

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To those on the outskirts, to be a Directioner or a Styles fan is to be a poster child for parasociality, or the belief that inciting social media wars with magazines or asking him to name your unborn child might one day be enough to earn your idol’s acknowledgment. But for those in the thick of it, that one-sided relationship is a conduit for very real friendships — and with Lucca Fresca, a place to share them.

“It would be great if there were other places like this,” said Abby Middaugh, 14, who convinced her parents to drive six hours from Buffalo, N.Y., to see Tomlinson perform in Philly and stop at Lucca Fresca on the way back.

Middaugh, who stumbled upon the band on TikTok years after they went on hiatus, said being a Directioner gave her a best friend, another girl at school harboring a crush on Styles. “I don’t know what I’d do without her,” Middaugh said.

“I live in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania, so being able to enjoy being a fan with people my age is rare,” said Leilah Giddens, 17, who made the two-hour drive from Reading with friends in June. “Sometimes, it is so fun to just be a little fangirl.”

Still, Lucca Fresca’s narrow focus on teenage obsessions hasn’t limited the business, said Krappa.

The shop has been profitable for at least a year, she said, and Krappa has been able to experiment with hosting themed birthday parties and providing shelf space for small-business owners to sell (mostly Harry Styles-themed) wares.

Krappa hopes to move Lucca Fresca into a bigger location, but is sheepish about franchising, even if it’s a common recommendation from customers. The Venn diagram of people with access to capital who also know how to make good smoothies and have an encyclopedic knowledge of One Direction is small, she said.

For now, Krappa is perpetually preparing for a surprise visit from Styles.

“I hope if he came here, he would think I’m doing a good job,” Krappa said. “And not a good job in terms of running a business, but a good job keeping the One Direction spirit alive.”