When teenage internet sensation Tavi Gevinson hit Melbourne recently, many book lovers older than their twenties were somewhat bemused by the breathless excitement that greeted her visit. They wondered: who is she, what exactly is Rookie (her online magazine), and why are young women so into it?
We sent 16-year-old writer Billie Tumarkin along to Tavi’s MWF events to report back on her appeal - and explain why Rookie Mag ‘stands at the front of an online revolution about how the media talks to, or rather with, teens’.
Tavi Gevinson, the 17-year-old Teen-Queen of creative youths, is about to enter the room. A hundred teens have become asthmatics; breathing is for wimps.
We are waiting.
Waiting.
Like a cult of some sort we become captivated by the possibility of the presence of a 17-year-old girl the size of a porcelain doll. Dear e.e. cummings, I’m sure you weren’t lying when you wrote ‘nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands’, but have you met Tavi?
We are waiting.
And there she is.
The room gasps. We all collectively sway beneath a paralysis induced by her appearance, partially knowing our response is ridiculous, partially trying not to faint.
I scribble on my notepad ‘she’s just a girl in a floral dress … I think.’
An 11-year-old Tavi Gevinson started an online fashion blog called The Style Rookie, and it got huge. On the back of this success she started Rookie Magazine in 2011, an online magazine aimed at teenage girls (and read by many outside the demographic). The website – weird and wonderful looking – holds within its pages poetry, fiction, articles, compilations, videos, art and all other form of creative mayhem about what it is, isn’t and could be like being a teenage girl.
Tavi, who has just started her last year of school, is its editor-in-chief.
Tavi was invited by the Melbourne Writers Festival to spread herself like fresh butter on our cultural bread. Tavi is a new flavour, the new flavour; she is poster girl for a type of teenager who may be a statistical minority but will jump atop of trees to be seen above the crowd. I heard Tavi speak twice – once at her MWF keynote, the second time at a three-hour creative-fest called Rookie Day.
Waiting in the queue (a very long, young, fashion-hyper-conscious, gender-imbalanced queue) outside the Athenaeum Theatre for Tavi’s keynote, there is a young girl, about 10, dancing in an enormous Mexican skirt on the benches on Collins St. Like your average drunk A Current Affair stalwart, she flings her skirt over her head; this is a place of abandon. A father delivers his daughter, and after being told to leave, ponders aloud whether he should have gotten a ticket for himself too. And though on this cold Friday Collins Street is flooded with, reportedly, the most self-absorbed and internally preoccupied generation of them all, accidental diplomacy wins the day and the queue curves and squishes to shelter as many people as possible from the rain.
The keynote is called ‘Tavi’s World’. Tavi – it’s funny that everyone calls her that, as if her age instantaneously makes her our friend or our lesser; etiquette says we should refer to her as Gevinson, and yet … She says that ‘a teenager is a caricature of a real person’. Teenagers (and I say this while jailed inside the exhibit) have a habit of doing what normal human beings do, just with amplifying adverbs tacked on: overly emotional, ridiculously sensitive, unnervingly distant, too loud, too real, too alive. In a way, Tavi has created in Rookie an amalgamation and an archive of things that reflects the enormous scope of everything that gives us a ‘much’ to have too much of. Tavi’s keynote is all about herself – about what makes her dream, tick, hope, collapse – yet it doesn’t feel self-indulgent or boring. It feels like a hand (a very small hand) reaching out to us, whoever we may be, a voice saying hello, I get you.
It’s inevitable that there is something peculiar about Tavi. She is instantly likable, she reeks of kindness and familiarity, but she also manages to be – to quote a friend of mine – ‘like a benevolent ruler, kindly allowing us lesser humans to engage with her’. During her keynote, in which she speaks with an intelligence seasoned by American gal filler words (yeah, you know), Tavi laments that she could never seem like Bjork or Joanna Newsom, like a strange woodland creature that came out of nowhere, with a lantern. With the internet we find that not only do great artists steal, all artists steal. Every idea can be quickly traced back to its origins, its evolutions and mutations. It’s easy to believe that originality is dead and we swim in a sea of clichés and recycled ideas. But the endless references that build up the internet give way to a different type of creativity, and in that we too can find originality.
Rookie Mag stands at the front of an online revolution about how the media talks to, or rather with, teens. There has been a movement away from the ‘how to get guys to like you’ overtly photoshopped magazines normally marketed to teenage girls. There is no ‘sealed section’ where girls are given permission to indulge in questions about the shameful and titillating topic of sex. It’s a slow process, and most of the media an average procrastination-prone teen consumes is still overwhelmingly based around squashing ourselves into boxes of expectations (skinny is good, gender is binary, sex and love have to be synonymous), but Rookie, a platform for others’ stories, not a how-to manual, is a glimpse of what media might become.
Tavi is in the State Library on an oddly nice Saturday making collages with us. We sit around tables cutting up new Frankies and old Woman’s Days. Our job is to create our dreams in A3. I tear out a photo of an elegant girl, ballgown and all, and paste on top of her a cut-out of the word groping. The cut-out comes with hands. On one side of me a girl pastes models – a little too skinny, a little too pale – in the sky with diamonds; on the other side of me there’s a cut-out dog in a jumper.
Later we turn off all the lights. Tavi and the Teens, who strain their necks to find her amongst our unnervingly taller heads, prepare to dance.
I remember when we broke up the first time
Saying, ‘This is it, I’ve had enough,’ ‘cause like
We hadn’t seen each other in a month
When you said you needed space. (What?)
So Taylor Swift, Tavi and the Teens scream along.
‘WE ARE NEVER EVER EVER EVER GETTING BACK TOGETHER.’
For a moment there we are never getting back together with the feeling that we can’t do it.
These are instant, rose-tinted memories of that Saturday. Surely it’s dangerous to remember only glitter-sprinkled moments — not, say, the fact that for the most part we were white girls in expensive clothes. I look back on these moments now like I imagine an adult looks back on their youth. Forgive the 16-year-old and her nostalgia. I’m sure every generation has its particular way of breeding dreams. Tavi, Rookie and all the instagram-filtered realities that come with them is our way – a magazine run with the thought, ‘What would I want to see?’
This is a tale of meeting Tavi Gevinson: a tiny girl in a floral dress … I think.
Billie Tumarkin regularly writes for Birdee and the Wheeler Centre and is a member of the team behind The Under Age.