One son, born to a gestational surrogate after seven rounds of IVF, and a mother who decided early how much of him the internet would get.

Tyra Banks’ Son, York Banks Asla

His name carries both parents in the order the family used from the first minute: Banks from his mother, Asla from his father. Banks announced him on Instagram on 27 January 2016 with the line that he was finally here, that he had her fingers and big eyes and his father’s mouth and chin, and with thanks to the woman who carried him. CBS News and The Hollywood Reporter both carried it within a day.

Two things about him are widely printed and wrong. His age is the first: profiles still describe him as eight, and one magazine explainer re-dated to February 2026 still does. He turned 10 on 27 January 2026. The second is the chef story. That belongs to his mother, who enrolled at a California culinary school in May 2016 so she could cook for him herself.

York is a ten-year-old whose only public voice is his mother’s. This guide therefore runs on what Banks has said on the record, dated to the day and the programme she said it on, and stops where she stops. His birth date, his dated age, his parents and the milestones his mother chose to publish are here. His school, his address, his routine and his photographs are not, and no amount of search demand changes that.

York Banks Asla at a glance

That first row has a caveat worth stating once, because it makes the whole page more honest rather than less useful. Every outlet dates York’s birth to 27 January 2016, and every one of them is dating the Instagram post. No hospital, no city and no certificate has ever been reported. Banks wrote that he was finally here, which reads as the same day, and ten years of coverage has treated it as his birthday. That is the strongest available answer, and it is the one this page calculates from.

Erik Asla’s row is bounded for a different reason. Nobody has published his date of birth. The 1964 year comes from a profile database, and the South China Morning Post independently described him in November 2024 as nine years older than Banks, which lands on the same year from a different direction. Two routes to one figure is worth reporting; it is still not a birth certificate, and this page says so rather than printing 62 as though it were fixed.

Seven rounds of IVF, then a surrogate

The route to York took years and Banks has described almost all of it herself, on camera, with dates attached. In 2015 she told People that fertility treatment had produced traumatic moments and that it got harder as she got older. Three years later she put a number on it on her own programme.

The most quotable version of the fertility story came much later. On TODAY with Jenna and Friends on 14 April 2025 she described a doctor telling her she had six eggs and then telling the woman behind the next curtain she had thirty-five, and asked why he could not have whispered it or written it down, because she was sitting there feeling inadequate. She added that IVF saved her, that York came from the last of her eggs, and that she had been very lucky to get there in time.

She was also, from the first sentence, explicit about who else the announcement was for. The post thanked the surrogate as the angel of a woman who carried their miracle baby, and prayed for everyone still struggling to reach the same milestone. Ten years on, that framing is the reason a supermodel’s birth announcement still turns up in fertility forums rather than only on celebrity pages.

Where the name York Banks Asla actually comes from

The surnames are the documented part. He carries his mother’s and his father’s, in that order, from the birth announcement onward, and no reporting has ever suggested that changed. It is one of the cleanest double-barrelled arrangements in celebrity family reporting: one name from each parent, used consistently by both.

The first name is the part nobody has explained. Banks has discussed his birth, his languages, his smize, his indifference to her fame and his opinion of photographers across a decade of interviews, and in none of them has she said why she chose York. Naming pages will tell you the word descends from the English city and before that from the Old English Eoforwic. That is a fact about the word, not a fact about the decision, and the two get confused constantly.

So the useful answer is the shape of the gap. Anything asserting a New York derivation, a Yorkshire connection or a family namesake is filling silence with invention, and none of it traces to Banks. What can be said is that the name arrived fully formed in a post that also carried both surnames, and that the family has used all three words together ever since, which is why he is almost never called simply York Banks.

Erik Asla: the father, and the exhibition record most profiles skip

Erik Asla is a Norwegian photographer who moved from Paris to California and became a protégé of Herb Ritts. He shot fashion for Vogue, Allure, Elle, Glamour, GQ Australia and Marie Claire before moving into fine art, and he studied law before any of it. Celebrity pages tend to stop at photographer; his own site is considerably more specific.

The exhibition list is checkable and it is the best evidence that he has a career independent of who he had a child with. The Stillness of Motion showed at Janssen Art Space in Palm Springs in 2017 and at Galleri Semmingsen in Oslo in 2018. Bevegelsens Stillhet ran at Drammens Museum in Norway in 2021. Elsewhere, three years of work shot across several continents, showed at Galleri Semmingsen from 29 August to 22 September 2024. His work has been acquired by the United States Department of State, Paramount Pictures, the Bank of Norway and Viking Cruises.

How he and Banks met is genuinely contested. The bulk of the 2016 and 2017 reporting says they met in 2013 through the Norwegian edition of the Top Model franchise, where he worked as a photographer. The South China Morning Post, writing in November 2024, says the American show instead. The Norwegian version has far more support and better contemporaneous sourcing, but the disagreement is real and this page shows it rather than picking quietly.

They separated in October 2017, reported first by Page Six and picked up the same day by Extra, which described the split as drama-free and said the two remained friends, continued working together professionally and were co-parenting York. That is the whole of the public record on the arrangement. No custody split, no court filing and no percentage has ever been reported, and the aggregator pages that publish one are inventing it. Asla also has three daughters from earlier relationships, which makes York the youngest in that branch and an only child in his mother’s.

The privacy line Tyra Banks drew, and the day she drew it

The founding episode is dated to Father’s Day 2017. Banks took York and her own father to a restaurant, was spotted by photographers, and tried to hide her son under a blanket. Then she made a calculation that a lot of famous parents make and very few describe out loud afterwards.

On Late Night with Seth Meyers, broadcast on 27 July 2017, she explained it: she had to put the picture out before the paparazzi did, because she did not want them making money off her child. And then, in the same breath, the regret. His picture was out there and she had not needed it to be. She has since told interviewers she is not a stage mother and does not want him to model.

What she has published herself, by contrast, is generous and easy to date. In 2018 she told People that her two-year-old was speaking Spanish, Norwegian and English and was already naming colours like rose gold. In October 2024 she said on TODAY that he had finally worked out she was a model and had started asking whether he was doing a model face. In April 2025 she said he had the natural thing she had at his age, and immediately added that she was not going to withhold his dinner over a smize.

The most revealing entry is the most recent. In an exclusive with HELLO! published on 11 December 2025 she said she had wanted to keep him unaware of her fame for as long as possible, and relayed his own shifting verdict on being photographed: first that he was not sure he liked it, then that he actually kind of wanted them to do it to him. She also answered the question that will follow him. If he wanted to work in entertainment he would have to study and earn it, because people were going to say nepo baby anyway, and she wanted them saying it for no good reason.

Ten years of dated statements about York, in order

Almost everything the public knows about this child arrived through one person on a fixed number of occasions. Laying them out by date is the fastest way to see how little is actually on the record and how much of what circulates has been extrapolated from it.

Set against that, look at what is absent. There is no interview in which he speaks for himself, no named school, no confirmed photograph of him in the last several years, and no statement from his father about him at all. A guide that fills those four gaps is not researching harder than everyone else. It is guessing, and the guesses are what turn into the next page’s facts.

The move to Sydney, and the question this guide leaves alone

Banks relocated to Sydney around late 2023, and the reason is a business rather than a lifestyle. She told TODAY with Jenna and Friends in April 2025 that she had been going to Australia constantly because the ice cream was being made there, in a large facility, and that she eventually asked her family whether they were going to do this. They did. Her market logic was blunt: the biggest ice cream eating countries are America, New Zealand and Australia.

The exact date of the move is not settled. HELLO! puts it in late 2023. Reporting derived from Us Weekly makes early 2024 the point at which Sydney became the main base. An Australian outlet writing in February 2026 describes two years split between Sydney and Los Angeles. All three can be true of a family that moved gradually, and none of them is a relocation date.

One event hardened it. In January 2025 Banks lost her Los Angeles house in the Palisades fire, and confirmed it on Australian breakfast television on 19 January, saying she had not wanted to pull attention towards herself when so many other people needed it. Coverage through 2026 still places her in Australia, and she has not been reported as having moved back.

A relocation with a child in it produces exactly one predictable question, and this guide is not going to answer it. No outlet has named York’s school in Los Angeles or in Sydney, and KidsCo does not publish schooling for a ten-year-old even when a parent mentions it in passing. What a reader can have instead is the substance: why the family moved, who moved with them, which business it was for, where that business trades now, and how his mother describes working from the kitchen table while he is in the house. That is the part she has offered, and it answers more than a school name would.

Where Tyra Banks herself is on 20 August 2026

Banks is 52 and turns 53 in December. Her career reads as three separate careers stacked end to end, and each one is easy to date because most of it happened on a network schedule. Here is the run of it, with the wording each period actually supports.

The Darling Harbour flagship is the piece that ties the business back to the move. It runs to about 120 square metres in front of Tumbalong Park, the ice cream is made in Sydney from local dairy, and the counter is a two-storey circular structure customers walk around instead of queueing at. Banks told an Australian trade title in July 2025 that Australia has some of the best dairy in the world, which is the commercial version of the same answer she gave on American television.

The brand name itself is a family document. SMiZE is her, and DREAM is her mother, Carolyn London, who moved in with Banks and York in 2020 and to whom the company is dedicated. When Banks showed her the finished Sydney shop in June 2025 both of them cried on camera. That is the through line from a Los Angeles childhood to a Darling Harbour lease, and it is a better answer to why she moved than any relocation date.

What most Tyra Banks son pages still get wrong

There is a pattern under those six. A single-child page has less material than a six-child page, so it gets padded, and the padding always comes from the same three places: a stale age, a repeated anecdote and a confident guess about a name. None of the three needs research to fix. They need a birth date, a calendar and the discipline to stop. The same discipline applies to Sofía Vergara’s only son, whose guide has the same shape and the same temptation, and across the whole KidsCo celebrity family index.

Two neighbouring guides are worth reading against this one for the same reason. Kim Kardashian and Ye’s four children covers two surrogate births in a family that publishes constantly, which is the opposite editorial problem, and Kendrick Lamar’s two children covers a parent who publishes almost nothing at all.

The timeline, and what each date proves

Two rows carry most of the weight. The January 2016 row is the anchor: every age dispute on every rival page resolves the moment somebody subtracts it from today’s date. The July 2017 row is the editorial one, because it is the day his mother said out loud what her policy would be, and nine years of coverage shows she meant it.

Questions people ask about Tyra Banks’ son York

How old is Tyra Banks’ son York?

York Banks Asla is 10. He was born on 27 January 2016 and turned 10 on 27 January 2026, so he stays 10 until 27 January 2027. Profiles still calling him eight are working from a 2024 age that was never recalculated.

Who is York Banks Asla’s father?

The Norwegian photographer Erik Asla. He trained under Herb Ritts, shot fashion for Vogue, Elle and GQ Australia, and now exhibits as a fine artist in Oslo and Norway. He met Banks in 2013 and the couple separated in October 2017.

Was Tyra Banks’ son born via surrogate?

Yes. York was carried by a gestational surrogate, whom Banks thanked in the birth announcement without naming her. Banks has said the pregnancy followed her seventh round of IVF, and that it used the last of her eggs.

Does Tyra Banks have any other children?

No. York is her only child. His father Erik Asla has three daughters from earlier relationships, so York has half siblings on the Asla side, but Banks has never had or adopted another child.

Why does Tyra Banks keep York out of the public eye?

She has explained it directly. After paparazzi photographed them in 2017 she posted a picture first to stop the sale, then said on television that she regretted it and had not needed his face out there at all.

Where does Tyra Banks live now?

Australia, mainly. She relocated to Sydney around late 2023 to build her ice cream company, and she lost her Los Angeles house in the January 2025 Palisades fire. Reporting through 2026 still places her between Sydney and the US.