Tavi's Big, Big World (At 17)

Surely Tavi Gevinson's Ideas At The House talk probably crammed more 12-to-16 year old girls into the Opera House gallery than any other single Opera House event. Titled Tavi's Big, Big World (at 17), the talk was less about the places that Gevinson had physically been, or the people that she'd met – though she has both travelled more widely and met more influential people than the average 17-year-old. Instead, Gevinson spoke about a different kind of world – the world that is her bedroom, where she constructs strange and beautiful flash cards to categorise Taylor Swift songs, where she colour-codes Stevie Nicks lyrics, where she reads Salinger and talks to her sisters. She talked about her “world” in a way that most of the audience related to and understood, but simultaneously gave an incredible cultural analysis of teen girl bedroom culture.

Gevinson also spoke about another kind of world: the virtual world. This was most fitting, given that, as she said, “I would never be standing here talking to you today if we lived in a pre-internet world.” However, she did worry about her own authenticity and originality in relation to the internet, saying, “I didn't find a band by digging through a crate in the back of a record store, I found them on my friend's blog. And 'blog' is a terrible word.” Gevinson explored the idea that perhaps the internet is not necessarily a bad way of “doing” culture, just a new one.

This brought us to an exploration of one of the ways that Gevinson “does” culture: through being a 'fangirl'. Potentially one of the few people in popular culture with anything positive to say about teenage girl fans of One Direction, Gevinson identified the often-missed fact that being a fangirl is rarely about the object of the fandom itself – instead, being a fangirl is about the sometimes devastating, sometimes wonderful, constantly exhilarating experience of being a fan. Gevinson managed to redeem a whole generation's cultural experience – and this is just one aspect of what makes her “big, big world” such an incredible thing to be a part of.