AUGUST – TAVI GEVINSON
Tavi
Gevinson wouldn't have surfaced in the popular consciousness in the
pre-social-media era. Or rather, since she is brilliant and articulate
and witty and original, she would probably have surfaced eventually,
just not when she was twelve years old.
In the pre-social-media era, she
wouldn't have been able to sit in her bedroom in her parent's house in a
suburb of Chicago, trolling on her computer through archives of decades
of advertising campaigns and runway photographs and magazine fashion
spreads. She wouldn't have accumulated the deep knowledge of fashion
history that she put to use on her blog, Style Rookie, where she posted
portraits of herself in her back yard wearing experimental outfits she
had assembled from thrift-shop purchases. Her ideas about fashion were
shared with hundreds of thousands of teens and pre-teens and their
mothers, and with the fashion cognoscenti. Rei Kawakubo flew her to
Tokyo for the Commes des Garçons holiday party. She chatted with Karl
Lagerfeld in Paris and had a public conversation with Iris Apfel at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
She shot a video for the Rodarte
label. When she was fifteen, she founded Rookie, an on-line magazine
for teenage girls. When she was eighteen, she went off-line and gave an
acclaimed performance in Kenneth Lonergan's play This Is Our Youth,
which opened in Chicago and moved to Broadway. As to what happens next,
stay tuned. Or logged in.
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