Meet Tavi Gevinson: The world’s most influential teenager on fashion, feminism and getting sound advice from her A-list friends
Front row with Anna Wintour, courted by Karl Lagerfeld, best mates with Lena Dunham, lunches with Taylor Swift. Jane Mulkerrins meets the super-connected, multi-talented fashionista turned editor and actress Tavi Gevison – and she’s only 19!
‘In a way, fashion had been this magical thing that I was obsessed with. But then I got too close to it, and that was kind of saddening,' said Tavi Gevinson
At the tender age of 11, when most preteens have yet to develop any sort of style savvy, Tavi Gevinson was already devoted to edgy high-fashion magazines including Lula, i-D and Dazed & Confused.
She set up a blog, Style Rookie, and began taking pictures of herself in the back garden of her family home in the Chicago suburbs, styled with inspiration from her fashion hero Rei Kawakubo, founder of the fashion label Comme des Garçons.
Style Rookie soon had 54,000 readers daily, including Anna Wintour, John Galliano and Karl Lagerfeld, and by the age of 13, the tiny teenager with the granny-chic aesthetic (her grey hair predating the current #grannyhair vogue espoused by Cara Delevingne and Kylie Jenner by several years), oversized glasses, layers of lace and knitwear – had been firmly adopted by the fashion pack.
She was dressed by super-hip labels such as Rodarte, consulted on Comme des Garçons’ line for U.S. store Target, featured on the cover of Pop magazine, and flown to New York to sit on the front row beside Wintour herself at Fashion Week shows.
At the end of her first New York Fashion Week, Tavi sat in the airport lounge at LaGuardia and cried.
‘My beauty icons are women who have remained beautiful and true to themselves through the years. Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton seem so comfortable in their own skin and have iconic presence,' said Tavi
‘I was, like, this is it,’ she recalls. ‘I got this one cool experience and now I was back to school, where I was made fun of for what I wore.’
Of course, that was far from it. In the six years since then, Tavi (who, like Madonna, goes by a single moniker) has proven that her precociousness was no flash in the pan, as she has matured into a true multi-hyphenate phenomenon – journalist-editor-actress – packing more into her teens than even the most industrious often manage in a lifetime.
At 15, she set up Rookie, her online magazine, which, at its peak, recorded 3.5 million hits a day; the following year she gave a TEDxTeen talk on representations of women in film and TV.
At 17, while at high school, she made her film debut alongside the late James Gandolfini in Enough Said, and last year, at 18, made her Broadway debut in the Kenneth Lonergan play This Is Our Youth.
At the tender age of 11, Tavi was already devoted to edgy high-fashion magazines
Tavi firmly rejects any sort of classification.
Lady Gaga may have heralded her as ‘the future of journalism’, but she claims she has ‘little desire to be a critic/reporter/journalist/commentator, so much as a travel diarist’ (the sort of confident, slightly lofty-sounding comment that has led to her polarising opinion since she first began obstructing the view of the catwalk with her huge hair bows at Fashion Week).
These days, at 19, the Style Rookie has blossomed into a blonde, green-eyed beauty, and is now part of Clinique’s #FaceForward campaign, celebrating individuality and female empowerment.
‘My beauty icons are women who have remained beautiful and true to themselves through the years,’ she says.
‘Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton seem so comfortable in their own skin and have iconic presence.’
Performing in This Is Our Youth took Tavi to New York City, where she now shares an apartment on the fashionable Lower East Side with her best friend Petra Collins, 22, a photographer and Rookie contributor.
‘When I come home, we get crafty, and watch TV and order pizza. Both ends of the scale of productivity and laziness are covered,’ says Tavi, who admits that most of her meals are ordered in.
‘I am so intense about time, and I don’t have the patience to cook – knowing that if I order dinner there will be more time to do other stuff.’
The chic boutiques and trendy bars of the Lower East Side are all a long way from Oak Park, the Chicago suburb in which Tavi grew up, the youngest of three sisters.
Her father Steve is a retired English teacher and her mother Berit, who is Norwegian, and converted to Judaism, weaves tapestries of scenes from the Torah.
‘The fashion seed was not planted by anyone in my family,’ confirms Tavi.
A friend’s elder sister had started a fashion blog herself.
‘I thought she was really cool, and she showed me the stuff she liked to read, and I wanted to be part of it.’
However, in spite of the astonishing success of her blog, and being lauded by the fashion industry’s big hitters, Tavi became a little disillusioned.
‘I did have an experience [during] my first year of high school where I realised how that world can make you so anxious about how bad you come off that you can’t really see outside yourself,’ she has said.
Three years ago, she hinted that the experience may have been a conversation with the editor of U.S. Vogue.
‘I sat next to Anna Wintour at a Band of Outsiders [a hip fashion label] show, and she asked me, “When do you go to school?” I just felt like saying, “When do your models go to school?”’ she said.
The exchange left the young blogger feeling deflated about the industry.
‘In a way, fashion had been this magical thing that I was obsessed with. But then I got too close to it, and that was kind of saddening.’
Tavi, pictured with Karl Lagerfeld in 2010, sports the grey haired 'granny look' before it became popular
Tavi met Anna Wintour (right) in 2010 but the experience left her feeling deflated
So, at 15, she set up Rookie, an online magazine for young women which had a million page views within its first six days.
Unlike more traditional publications aimed at the teen market, Rookie’s focus was not diets and sex advice from older ‘experts’, but a more curated, feminist content, written by its readers.
Much of the content is – like Tavi herself – smart and unashamedly earnest. There is fashion and beauty, but also culture, confessionals and interviews, as well as discussions on how to survive heartache and high school.
The section Ask A Grown Man has featured Jon Hamm, Paul Rudd and Judd Apatow as agony uncles, while many of Tavi’s celebrity friends – Lena Dunham, Taylor Swift and Lorde – have been contributors as well as interviewees. Although it is aimed at a youth market, Rookie’s readers stretch well into middle-age.
Expectations were, of course, high.
‘I remember when the first Rookie Yearbook [the annual printed compendium of the best of the year’s online content] came out, there was a lot written about me as “Girl Power’s last hope”,’ she recalls.
‘That felt like so much responsibility. One person can’t be the face of feminism. There have to be many different people, with their own relationship to the version of feminism that they identify with,’ she asserts.
Tavi's performance in This Is Our Youth, set in early 1980s Manhattan, with Kieran Culkin and Michael Cera (pictured right), was called ‘astonishingly assured’ by The New York Times
Tavi was interviewed by talk show host Jimmy Fallon in 2014
‘And I think that is starting to happen, partly because of people like Taylor [Swift] and Ella [Lorde]. I’m thrilled that the word is becoming destigmatised though,’ she continues.
‘And I love that part of my job is to create a platform for all kinds of young people to talk about what feminism means to them.’
The huge success of the site has inevitably led to Tavi being held up as a role-model-cum-oracle.
‘I hate being heartbroken, but who better to discuss it with than Taylor Swift?’ said Tavi
‘Girls look up to me, maybe, but they know that I’ve never said I have the answers,’ she counters.
‘And Rookie isn’t about having the answers – it’s a place where we can discuss issues and work them out.’
It’s also a place Tavi goes to for help and support: ‘When I broke up with my high-school boyfriend, I was desperately looking up everything under the break-up tag on Rookie,’ she admitted last summer.
(She also went to visit her friend Taylor Swift at her home in Rhode Island – ‘I hate being heartbroken, but who better to discuss it with than Taylor Swift?’ – and Lena Dunham on the set of Girls, an almighty combination of wise, sisterly support.)
She has also sought counsel from Dunham on professional matters.
‘I have asked her for career advice,’ she says.
There are aspects of her acting career that make her anxious.
‘Not being in control,’ for example. ‘Acting is a creative medium where you need permission to be able to do it, and you need approval,’ she says. ‘And it’s all so arbitrary.’
She has developed some strategies, however, including wearing high heels if she needs to write stern emails.
Acting isn’t a complete departure for Tavi, who was active in community theatre back in Oak Park.
‘I did have some imposter syndrome, but then I remembered I’ve been acting since I was little,’ she says.
For the role in This Is Our Youth, she flew to New York to audition for the casting director and the play’s writer and producer, none of whom were aware of her media profile.
Her performance in the play, set in early 1980s Manhattan, with Kieran Culkin and Michael Cera, was called ‘astonishingly assured’ by The New York Times.
And now, after four years of managing a band of writers, artists and editors scattered across the U.S. and beyond, Rookie finally has a real office in New York City, where Tavi – editor-in-chief of the magazine and its Yearbook – works with the staff and an editorial director who is in her 40s.
Tavi’s friend Lena Dunham (left) and director Judd Apatow (right), who have contributed to Rookie. ‘I have asked her for career advice,’ she said
‘It’s a game-changer,’ Tavi said recently.
‘I never really had work hours before because Rookie was more my after-school passion than my job. I’m a lot more productive in an actual office.’
Not that a lack of productivity is something that Tavi could ever be accused of: she creates moodboards for her life and has always been ‘a big journaler’. She’s also a keen list-maker.
‘I use an app called Clear for my to-do lists,’ she says.
‘And I think the key to not procrastinating is to have so much to do that you can’t put it off, you just have to do it.’
‘It’s a game-changer,’ Tavi said recently of Rookie which finally has an office in New York City
This Is Our Youth was supposed to form part of her gap year before college, a plan she has shelved for the present.
‘I don’t want to put everything else on hold,’ she says.
‘In high school, everything I liked doing was online. Now, I see everyone in person and I don’t want to give that up.’
Focused and ferociously industrious, she appears to have skipped any rebellious phase – we won’t see Tavi papped stumbling out of New York’s nightclubs any time soon.
But with so much already behind her before the age of 20, what creative endeavours are left for her to conquer?
‘I’d like to try screenwriting and fiction, and more acting, theatre in particular,’ she says.
‘I just don’t want to limit myself. I’m not fearless,’ she claims. ‘But for me the fear of holding myself back always outweighs the fear of what could happen by doing something.
‘The first year of Rookie, I did not sleep at all, and I got horrible grades for the rest of high school,’ she admits.
‘But I felt I had done this thing that was satisfying for me in a way that schoolwork never was.
'So when you take chances like that, there’s risk and there’s fear and there are compromises, but the thing you find could be so incredible.’
Tavi is one of three key influencers in Clinique’s #FaceForward campaign, which encourages women to set goals and achieve their aspirations. clinique.co.uk/face-forward; rookiemag.com
Tavi on…
Beauty When I’m really blown away by a woman’s beauty in a movie, it’s because she’s really giving herself to the performance. My friends are beautiful to me when they’re being funny, sweet and sincere.
Make-up The two things I use no matter what are Clinique’s Dramatically Different Moisturising Lotion+ and black Clinique mascara – and I have a wide selection of their Chubby Sticks for lips.
Style In the beginning I was inspired by theatrical designers, and I’d try to replicate those looks. If I got made fun of, I’d try to look even weirder. Sometimes fashion is my outlet but sometimes I just wear a comfortable white shirt so that I can go about my day and put my energy into making other cool stuff.
The fashion industry Sometimes I worry that people think I’m shallow because I write about fashion, or used to. I think that fashion can be friends with feminism and it can be a tool for self-expression and empowerment. But there are flaws in the industry that grind my gears.
Body issues I’ve wondered why I don’t have worse body issues; I think it’s because [when I started blogging at 11] I saw myself as a child. It would have been weird to compare myself to models.
Books Ghost World [by Daniel Clowes] was huge for me, growing up in a suburb and feeling alienated. It made me see that life can be funny and beautiful and sweet, instead of walking around hating everything.
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