Inside The Life Of A 17-Year-Old Fashion Powerhouse

Quick question: What were you doing at 13? Most of us were either cooped up inside playing computer games or, umm… at school. Not Tavi Gevinson. If you believe the hype, Gevinson is the face of the future of journalism, but if you talk to the now 17-year-old, you'll find that she's just trying to “work it all out”. At 13, Gevinson was seated next to the US Vogue's Editor-In-Chief Anna Wintour at Fashion Week. It caused a great brouhaha amongst the 'fashion elite' because, and get this, Gevinson decided to wear a bright pink bow to the event. The youngster was invited courtesy the growing popularity of her quirky blog, Style Rookie, which has now evolved into an online magazine for teenage girls, dropping the Style part in the process.

“Oh, gosh, I'm trying to find a place to sit down! I'm walking on a street and there are like cars everywhere,” the insanely busy Gevinson pants. She's on the phone from her hometown sunny LA ahead of her trip down under to wax lyrical about her “stuff” at the Sydney Opera House and the Melbourne Writers Festival.

And, she's kinda nervous.                   

Despite a successful tilt at the speaking circuit thanks to a TEDxTeen talk on 'Still Figuring It Out' that saw her encourage all girls to “be like Stevie Nicks” (“she gave me a crescent moon necklace after that talk!” gushes Gevinson), this time around the teenager admits that she's not as prepared.

“Well, now I'm kind of still working it out. There are all these notes, and with my TED talk that was about having an idea and I kind of just stuck all these notes together, but this hasn't been coming together as cleanly. I want to talk about a bunch of different things.”

One of those things is her burgeoning interest in feminism.

“Basically, I got into feminism at the end of my middle school years. I read a couple of books about feminism and pop culture and the riot grrrl movement, and it just resonated with me. It all really started at that age when you think about your body and your image and your relationship to boys…” Gevinson drifts off before adding, “the hardest thing is just figuring out who you are and how your gender comes into that.”

Entering the gender wars proved to be one of the smartest decisions the then 15-year-old (!) made. Sick of writing only about fashion, she expanded her online publishing empire to include anything and everything for teenage girls and, in turn, launched Rookie. The magazine – unabashedly un-airbrushed and featuring many of Gevinson's own articles – is now something of a safe haven for teenage girls to escape into. There's a mix of articles, with everything from music and movies to guides on things like How To Do Bitchface and How To Deal When You're Caught Masturbating.

“I like to explore a lot of problems and the things facing teenage girls,” Gevison says. “Of course, I have an easier time writing about the ones I have more experience dealing with, well, given my limited experience with things – I mean, I'm from a middle-class suburb and I'm a white girl. But the good thing about Rookie is that we have almost 80 staffers now and that's a lot of people who come from different backgrounds and who can tell their own story.”

The online publishing wunderkind now divides her time between editing Rookie and being a (relatively) 'normal' teenager. When asked how on earth she managed to fit it all in, Gevinson laughs: “Someone once told me the key to not procrastinating is to do so much that you don't have time to procrastinate, so I cut out things that aren't interesting to me. Of course, there are some things that I have to do – I mean, I would not appreciate the irony of doing a blog about teenage girls and then quitting school.”