Teens Take Note: The Style Rookie Grows Up

After four years in the spotlight, Tavi Gevinson, the girl who’s famous for launching her first blog at 11 and getting embraced by the fashion world as an idiosyncratic genius at 12, is sixteen. And she’s one of the most interesting 16-year-olds around.

For those who don’t know about her, Gevinson is a true wunderkind. Part of what makes her so fascinating is that she is pioneering a new kind of child celebrity made possible by the Internet: she is famous for what she thinks. Her first blog The Style Rookie went viral, earning her regular invitations to high profile fashion shows, sometimes even sitting next to Vogue editor Anna Wintour. At 15 she diversified, founding Rookie, a feminist website for teenage girls. Right now she’s gracing the cover of Bust magazine and she has a profile in the Style section of the New York Times. This is not the first time Gevinson has been profiled by the Times. And yet she’s still a real teenager, who says things like “daisies are literally the best thing ever” and has a reputation for crying when she listens to Taylor Swift songs. And like all teenagers, Gevinson is reinventing herself. Her roots are in fashion, but she says these days she is more interested by pop culture and feminism. She ditched her dyed bluish-gray granny hair for a blonde Laura Palmer Twin Peaks cut. Lately she’s been wearing mod eyeliner and trying more form fitting clothing, although she worries men will think it is for them. She’s growing up, and it’s changing her creative output.

Gevinson told Bust, “My sister Rivkah always tells me that I’m really lucky that I discovered feminism when I was 12, because I gained an understanding about it as I was hitting that teenage-girl self-esteem drop.” That drop in self-esteem for teenage girls is a really big deal. Earlier this month the Keep It Real anti-Photoshop campaign released a study saying that 53 percent of 13-year-old girls are unhappy with their bodies. The number increases to 78 percent by age 17. Even worse, 80% of 10-year-olds say they’ve been on a diet. The data is alarming, but it also makes sense because girls know women get more attention for how they look than for what they do.

Rookie is trying to change that. The site cares about fashion (no product of Gevinson’s could ever ignore it), but it treats style as art and a way to express yourself-not a way to attract a boy. The writers interview cool, successful women and share advice on how to join a band (something girls still aren’t conditioned to do) or how to become “the next Didion, or Hurston, or Woolf, or you.” Yesterday they ran a story about how to safely skip school and have a great time doing it. Like Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls at the Party, Rookie just wants girls to get up and do something. And they’re leading by example. At Rookie Gevinson is the editor-in-chief and half of her staff are teenagers. The editorial director, Anaheed Alani, is 41 and calls Gevinson her boss. In Bust Alani writes, “My philosophy on bosses has always been that I won’t work for someone who isn’t smarter than me, and Tavi Gevinson definitely fits my criteria.” She’s clearly inspired by the 16-year-old, and so are the girls who turned out in droves to meet Tavi during Rookie‘s recent promotional road trip. “I actually started my own blog because of her,” one girl told the Times. We’re sure she isn’t the only one.