Trying on a new look suits Tavi Gevinson. No longer the novel, silver-haired, little glamour girl rubbing elbows with Anna Wintour at eleven-years-old, she’s now flaunting a polished blonde bob and a refreshingly grounded outlook on growing up and entrepreneurship, Tavi Gevinson is growing up before our eyes. After five years in the spotlight as a high-profile blogger, she’s riding her “Style Rookie” fame toward continuing her successes both on computer screen and the big screen. The heralded high school junior “voluntarily skipped out entirely on fashion week festivities,” according to The NY Times and has recently been critical of the fashion world, focusing instead on cultivating Rookie as an online cultural destination, furthering her education, and fostering a new acting endeavor.
In an Adweek piece she seems to say that she peeked behind the curtain and found, like many everyday girls who flip through magazines do, that fashion can be as disheartening as it is enchanting: “I did have an experience at Fashion Week my freshman year of high school where I realized how that world can make you so caught up and anxious about how you come off that you can’t really see outside of yourself, and I was just like, this is bad. I would like to avoid this.” She didn’t go into detail about what affected her so deeply, but it’s not too tough to speculate what the often-condemned runway world is really like and how it might have shaken the otherwise self-assured then fourteen-year-old.
At the Toronto Film Festival, where she was promoting her first feature film role as the awkward teenaged daughter in Enough Said, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus and the late James Gandolfini, Tavi told The NYTimes that the transition has been exciting and that she finds acting to be a world away from the intimate space of writing. “…writing is also so different from acting. But the thing I work toward is just to get that feeling where you’re really in a kind of a zone — which sounds really pretentious — but I don’t really care because if you worry about sounding pretentious you can’t say anything smart, ever. [Laughs.] ”
She says she’s busy applying to colleges and may take a year off, but is intent on heading to the East Coast to take a bite out of the Big Apple, “Now I want to go to school in New York so that working on Rookie and stuff like that can finally become real. I don’t want, like, another four years of going to class and coming home and working on my laptop and having fear of missing out. So it would be nice to be in New York.”
What will style and culture chameleon Tavi Gevison’s next incarnation be? –– Casandra Armour
