The Inimitable Tavi Gevinson

START
body

When asked what she would tell her generation if given five minutes of their undivided attention, 19-year-old Tavi Gevinson looks down sheepishly into the cup of coffee she is currently cradling at Cafe Cluny in the West Village. “If you gave me five minutes,” she says, “I would give a minute to four other girls I know.”

This modest sentiment is, in many ways, a perfect summary of the young woman that fashion’s most junior journalist has become. An early proponent of the Internet as an online forum, Gevinson became a sensation at the age of 12 with her blog, Style Rookie. She spent her pre-high school years chronicling her forensic exploration of fashion, from her daily looks to critiques of the latest collections, ultimately becoming a front-row staple.

Looking back, Gevinson is only now beginning to realize that her adolescence was anything but average. “When I was younger, I still lived at home and I would come to New York, go to fashion week, but then I would go home and go to school,” she recalls. “So, for me, that was what being 12, 13, and 14 meant. I felt very removed from it, in a healthy way. It was a form of play. I often think about how the best thing for me was writing every day, having that outlet, trying to challenge myself to wear things that I was afraid of wearing to school. It’s really only occurring to me now how weird my life was.”

Going into high school, at the age of 14, Gevinson began to tire of hearing only her own voice. She decided to transform Style Rookie into Rookie, an online magazine that would serve as a platform for young girls to share their opinions and have a dialogue about issues their generation faces every day, from body perception problems to consumerism to feminism, with a roster of contributors ranging from Lena Dunham to Miranda July, and a full editorial team based out of a Willliamsburg office.

“With Rookie I wanted a lot of contributors, and by now hundreds of people have been published on the site,” Gevinson says. “I didn’t want someone to have to be a fan of me to be able to read and appreciate Rookie. I’m very glad to come across readers who don’t know that I’m the editor–or who I am.”

While Gevinson has overseen the online publication as editor-in-chief since its inception in 2011 (including the release of four “yearbooks” presenting the best pieces from each year in bound form), she is scaling down her duties to explore other interests. She just finished a stint on Ryan Murphy’s teen horror hit Scream Queens and this April will appear alongside Sophie Okonedo, Saoirse Ronan, and Ben Whishaw in the much-anticipated return of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible on Broadway.

With the one minute afforded to herself in our hypothetical, the wise Gevinson offers the following to her peers: “Listen to yourself and listen to each other. Listen to others because you’ll learn so much being exposed to other people’s experiences.”

END

prev link: https://crfashionbook.com/celebrity/a9572491/tavi-gevinson/
createdAt:Thu, 27 Apr 2017 20:44:33 +0000
displayType:Standard Article
section:Celebrity