Feb 19, 2010
Feb 18, 2010
N.Y. Mag's The Cut has this (below) to offer on Tavi-at-Fashion-Week. And what? What is happening here? I need a nap!--
Last night, 13-year-old blogger Tavi joined Susie Bubble, Bryanboy, Phil Oh of Street Peeper, and Britt Aboutaleb and Lauren Sherman of Fashionista.com for a panel discussion on “The Future of Fashion Blogging” at the Evolving Influence Fashion Blog Conference hosted by the Independent Fashion Bloggers. Tavi — clearly the blogger everyone was most excited to see — won coos and applause with almost every comment. And with good reason! Some highlights below.
On personal-style blogging:
“You can write about what you care about. There’s always someone who also really loves, like, Seinfeld as well as dead dolls, as well as Prada. I think the few times I’ve tried to do more news reporting, I can only go so far until I have to make a Freaks & Geeks reference. For me it’s easier to write as a personal-style blog.”
On technology changing the media landscape:
“Nick Knight started ShowStudio in 2000, like a decade ago, and the scary part is in five years, it’s going to be like the iPhone. I remember there was this old Lindsay Lohan Disney Channel movie and she was video chatting with her friends about what they were going to wear, and that was so technologically advanced to me, and now you don’t have to be like a spy on Disney Channel to do it.”
On people saying bloggers have no business sitting front row:
“Well, if you generalize it like that, then it’s like people with computers can’t be in the front row.”
On the blogger-versus-editor argument:
“A lot of it is kind of made up. I think it started to sort of come back and gain a little more momentum when a Grazia writer was sitting behind me and couldn’t see because of my hat. But like I saw what [she] Twittered, which was ‘Can’t see behind Tavi’s bow,’ and it’s like, I think [she was] just sort of like making a joke. But then it was like [transfers to ominous voice-over voice] ‘Bloggers and Editors at War — which side are you on?’” [Audience erupts into laughter and applause]
On reading her own press:
“I read my own comments because I rarely get a negative commenter on my blog. I don’t read comments on other sites when other people have written about me and I generally don’t read the article. I have to be with myself all the time, and I don’t really want to read about myself. If somebody doesn’t like me, it’s probably somebody I’m never going to meet. It’s just part of the game.”
Feb 17, 2010
Feb 15, 2010
Non-Sporting
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.
Happy Meetings
Raphael wrestling with Asmodeus, detail of Wedding Night of Tobias and Sarah, Pieter Lastman, 17th Century.
The Archangel Raphael: patron of bodily ills, insanity, nightmares, travelers, the blind, happy meetings, the sick, lovers, healers, the young, and apothecaries. He bound the demon Azazel beneath the desert of Upper Egypt, cured Tobias of his blindness, and delivered Sarah from the demon Asmodeus.
Feb 14, 2010
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