I wrote about Jane Aldridge some months ago (and months slow). Now Tavi Gevinson, because she persists.
Her blog, I find, is kind of unreadable. I mean I get bored (which, honest-to-G-d, happens almost never). I like the way she looks. But her age (13).
Tavi is multiple generations removed--her parents are Gen-X-ers--from most of those fans and critics who have taken to arguing her place/voice in/around the media*. So, often, folks who say she is "brave" and "special" for being curated-quirky have forgotten about or not quite wised up to a post(!)-hipster topography, where "outsider" (like, aestheticized outsider) has been normalized or at least widely valorized (like note, the twee varietals, musically/hair-liy, of the early/mid- Aughts are all over car and deodorant commercials nowadays). And okay: her age, the gimmick of her age, is why Tavi's famous--'there are so many 27-year-old stylists yawn.' And how legit', grown-up editors complain about her sudden fame/possible influence (though I think it's clear she does her own writing), I feel them, because when you're Ann Slowey and you're 40-something and you have a family and you spent your twenties in editorial indentured servitude to get where you've gotten and your shite boss made you do one season of a reality show because he's freakin' yesterday's populist.....
Do we really need children on the Internet making paid-jobs irrelevant in this cool climate? Nope.
And then there's the thing about Tavi's age (and Jane's age) that ought to be said over and over and just isn't. They are kids, and the access they permit, via their blogs, to their homes and schedules and bodies--self-portrait after self-portrait (regardless of prim or layered clothes)--is dangerous! I was in college when social-networking sites really happened in America, but I'm pretty sure that if I had been a teen or tween at the time, despite protestations, my parents would not have permitted my membership. And a publicly accessible, self-documenting blog---HELL NO, not even a little bit. I get that models are often somewhere in the 14-17 range, but I've never liked that either (when I was a tyke-with-a-September-issue, everyone [big] but Kate Moss was like 25). And beyond the blog: Tavi at fashion week. Tavi on the covers of Love and Pop. Tavi on Last Night's Party. Yuck y'all! Real talk: more than a couple of depraved people work in fashion, or host soft openings of bar/restaurants coinciding with fashion week. I just hate the idea of a middle-schooler rolling out to these cocaine vampire parties, with or without parents (think about Allegra!).
Again with age, in a personal way, Tavi is, you know, way younger than me. And it's not the first time I've noted uncomfortably that young stuff is happening in a manner I don't totally understand (there was that minute when I hated Miley and T. Swift). But here, now, a picture of a generation other than mine, younger than mine, made from some divergent materials, is forming. Petrova noted recently (not on A&P, but in our living room) that ours was, luckily and unluckily (cancer!), the first to receive cell phones and the Internet. Yes. I also enter that the term "receive" is crucial; we received, but we did not inherit. We were firsts and lasts---last to wrap telephone cords around banisters while making play dates with specific, unvarying hours and locations, last to be kids (at least for a few years) without search engines and email accounts.
We know the Internet. But do we wholly trust the Internet? And is it intrinsic to our understanding, our measurement of everything else? Somewhat, but not absolutely and unflaggingly. Granted, this pursuit of generation generalization is unsound....I knew a girl who went from chat room boyfriend to chat room boyfriend in 1997 unself-consciously, but she was singular...everybody else crushed local, polo-shirted brother-school local.
Her blog, I find, is kind of unreadable. I mean I get bored (which, honest-to-G-d, happens almost never). I like the way she looks. But her age (13).
Tavi is multiple generations removed--her parents are Gen-X-ers--from most of those fans and critics who have taken to arguing her place/voice in/around the media*. So, often, folks who say she is "brave" and "special" for being curated-quirky have forgotten about or not quite wised up to a post(!)-hipster topography, where "outsider" (like, aestheticized outsider) has been normalized or at least widely valorized (like note, the twee varietals, musically/hair-liy, of the early/mid- Aughts are all over car and deodorant commercials nowadays). And okay: her age, the gimmick of her age, is why Tavi's famous--'there are so many 27-year-old stylists yawn.' And how legit', grown-up editors complain about her sudden fame/possible influence (though I think it's clear she does her own writing), I feel them, because when you're Ann Slowey and you're 40-something and you have a family and you spent your twenties in editorial indentured servitude to get where you've gotten and your shite boss made you do one season of a reality show because he's freakin' yesterday's populist.....
Do we really need children on the Internet making paid-jobs irrelevant in this cool climate? Nope.
And then there's the thing about Tavi's age (and Jane's age) that ought to be said over and over and just isn't. They are kids, and the access they permit, via their blogs, to their homes and schedules and bodies--self-portrait after self-portrait (regardless of prim or layered clothes)--is dangerous! I was in college when social-networking sites really happened in America, but I'm pretty sure that if I had been a teen or tween at the time, despite protestations, my parents would not have permitted my membership. And a publicly accessible, self-documenting blog---HELL NO, not even a little bit. I get that models are often somewhere in the 14-17 range, but I've never liked that either (when I was a tyke-with-a-September-issue, everyone [big] but Kate Moss was like 25). And beyond the blog: Tavi at fashion week. Tavi on the covers of Love and Pop. Tavi on Last Night's Party. Yuck y'all! Real talk: more than a couple of depraved people work in fashion, or host soft openings of bar/restaurants coinciding with fashion week. I just hate the idea of a middle-schooler rolling out to these cocaine vampire parties, with or without parents (think about Allegra!).
Again with age, in a personal way, Tavi is, you know, way younger than me. And it's not the first time I've noted uncomfortably that young stuff is happening in a manner I don't totally understand (there was that minute when I hated Miley and T. Swift). But here, now, a picture of a generation other than mine, younger than mine, made from some divergent materials, is forming. Petrova noted recently (not on A&P, but in our living room) that ours was, luckily and unluckily (cancer!), the first to receive cell phones and the Internet. Yes. I also enter that the term "receive" is crucial; we received, but we did not inherit. We were firsts and lasts---last to wrap telephone cords around banisters while making play dates with specific, unvarying hours and locations, last to be kids (at least for a few years) without search engines and email accounts.
We know the Internet. But do we wholly trust the Internet? And is it intrinsic to our understanding, our measurement of everything else? Somewhat, but not absolutely and unflaggingly. Granted, this pursuit of generation generalization is unsound....I knew a girl who went from chat room boyfriend to chat room boyfriend in 1997 unself-consciously, but she was singular...everybody else crushed local, polo-shirted brother-school local.
This isn't fully fleshed.
Just, there's a kind of elemental borderlessness, creepy thrill-at collectivism, sometime genderlessness I've observed in the churren. They've always (never not) been entitled to participate in, to dictate and shift this broad other-world where they can watch porn and maybe get record deals.
[pause] Anyway [pause]
It makes me feel dusty and non-sporting.
It makes me feel dusty and non-sporting.
*Note: Bloggers champion Tavi as a media iconoclast, part of their print-slaying number, death to Wintour, etc. But paper magazines are essential to Style Rookie with it's scanned-in collages...I find, most have framed this discussion blindly, laden with specific industry politics.
6 comments:
Great post.
I suppose it needn't be said, but my fusty self is tickled at how Leigh Lezark now bears no trace of Don Hill's, or perhaps Don Hill's bears no trace of Don Hill's. In fact, it seems unlikely at this point that she could exist outside of Europe; or, for that matter, that there was a time when she could !
Maybe I am overly optomistic, but I think she is a bit of a memento mori for Gaga.
I felt like Leigh Lezark's modeling contract of 2007 was kind of like Zelda Fitzgerald's mental hospital leave for ballet school...
Gaga has handily side-stepped any talk of illegitimacy. In 2004 and 5 she was wearing her Victoria's Secret bikini behind a keyboard at The Bitter End. But it didn't take much for her to gesturally co-opt a whole decade's worth of tortured, exclusive/demi-exclusive partying that she was never party to; because the partying never was much.
are those her parents???
haha nvm I didn't look at the picture close enough. It makes me feel old (in a superior way) how obsessed she is with los 90's.
this week she's been well-placed at all the big shows. i just can't imagine being a grown-ass journalist given the same treatment as a 90s-crazed 13-yr-old girl with a 1-yr-old blog. how ruuuude!
However I try, I can't just get past "chaos" with either of these (I mean Tavi, Gaga— Leigh was never chaos and the worse for it). They are entropy without congruity or meaningful proportion and old-fashioned me still can't see the point of it. "A mirror to reality" lacks a certain amount of enterprise.
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