What
were you doing when you were eleven? I was listening to trendy music, trying to
fit in, and usually I was trapped in my own world that was defined by the pop
culture around me. I never once questioned what I saw if I knew it to be
"cool" or liked by other people.
Tavi Gevinson was not doing that. She
is the perfect modern example of challenging the status quo in teenage girl
form. At age eleven she started a style blog to essentially "blow off
fashion steam" that her parents didn't want to hear. She called the blog
"Style Rookie" and used it to blog about her fashion interests. She
followed major names and offered her opinion as well as recording pictures of
her own style. Her blogs were written with quality that most eleven year olds could not achieve. She covers her own
fashion issues in her blogs, especially ridicule from her peers for her
odd fashion tastes. She says in one blog
"My
classmates called me a hippie. One kid told me I should have been "in a
basement, smoking a joint."
I'm not offended by this. Lately 70's is a
style I've been trying to impersonate. But come on kids, if you wanna insult
me, come up with something better!
I try not to let these kinds of things get
under my skin, though (...)
Ah, well. What are you gonna do."
She
was immediately recognized in the fashion community and became
big fast. She has most recently started a magazine called
"Rookie" for teenagers that offers positive images and messages for
girls. In an interview she had with Steven Colbert on his show “The Colbert
Report”, Colbert asked Tavi “if girls feel good about themselves how are we
going to sell them things they don’t need?” Colbert put her on the spot with
this witty yet unfortunately true question about the way images in popular
media effect teenage girls today.
Tavi
Gevinson continues to challenge the status quo with her casual and yet brilliant
ability to be herself. She may not be making the kind of waves that Martin
Luther King Jr. or Gandhi made, but she is fighting a battle amongst women and
especially teenage girls that has gone on for far too long. We cannot continue
to let the status quo expectations of appearance create unhealthy situations
for women.
She
challenges the image of teenage girls in a multitude of ways from dying her
hair grey for a year to arguing for the intelligence of teenage girls. She
argues that the overall picture people see when they think of the typical
teenage girl is invalid especially when it comes to pop culture. When asked
about the role models of this time she says,
“I think
about how obsessed everyone is with Miley Cyrus' virginity. You see everyone
being like 'that's so awful all these girls look up to her blah blah blah' and
you never really hear anything from girls themselves. I think you can trust
young women to look at something like Miley Cyrus and form their own opinions.
But there isn't really a place for them to do that. So I guess that's part of
what we'd like to do with Rookie.”
In
this way she is saying that the pop-culture interests of teenage girls today
are not superficial. She has high respect for her readers. Though some consider
their interests ridiculous she says about “Rookie” that,
“When I
tell people I'm starting a website for teenage girls I'm met with laughter so
many times because people can't really imagine that existing and not being
vapid or something. But you have to respect the intelligence of your readers.
Teenage girls are smart and can think for themselves.”
The
most impressive thing about Tavi is that she continues to stay true to her
style throughout all the recognition she receives. Her fame began with her
character and continues with her character. Every day the Internet creates
opportunity for average people to challenge the status quo in their own unique
ways. Tavi continues to take advantage of the outlet that made her an icon to
create something worth listening to for what society has deemed the “vapid-vain-self
serving” culture that Tavi and I belong to.
If this interests you at all here are some wonderfully Tavi things to check out:
Her blog, The Style Rookie (which by the way continues to be as insightful as when she started 5 years ago at age 11!!!)
This is brilliant! Every time I see the things my sisters read (Seventeen) I reel at the unrealistic images of young women that are being fed to middle school girls. I think it's GREAT that there's media out there that shows normal girls and styles that don't sexualize eleven-year-olds.
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