Who better to interview 'teen fashion blogging sensation' Tavi Gevinson (as she became widely known) than 'style icon and it girl' Alexa Chung? Two iconic pop culture figures for the millennial generation, both of whom experienced a meteoric claim to fame - made all the more precocious and extraordinary in Tavi's case by the fact that she only just graduated from her Chicago high school.
Yuh huh. At just 18 years old, she has scored a cool 8 pages in the current issue of British Vogue. It's not even based on her fashion smarts, either. Because whilst Tavi inevitably has those in spades she has come a long way from the lilac hair, granny glasses and mish mish of colour and print that made her famous as a pint-sized FROW member. In fact, despite her classic retro-feminine aesthetic that calls to mind a fusion of _The Virgin Suicide_s and Margo from The Royal Tenenbaums, she's pretty much rejecting the fashion world wholesale, right now.
With self-assurance rather than arrogance, Tavi says baldly of her fall out of love, of sorts, with the fashion world: 'I was at a fashion show and I was seated next to Anna Wintour and 'The End' by The Doors came on. And I looked around and thought, 'These models look miserable. These people look miserable and they're on their phones.' And it wasn't like a decisive moment, but it coincided with this feeling of discovering so many other things that were interesting to me.'
Those other things have been gradually emerging from Tavi's lifestyle platform and digital zine for teenage girls (though quite frankly as non-teenage girls we also love it), Rookie Mag - with a strong emphasis on the arts (last year Tavi appeared in film Enough Said) and feminist culture. Having boxed up all vestiges of her previous blog life - she now shares just half a rail with her mother - Tavi has both literally and metaphorically packed up her blogging clothes and shipped them out (to the basement.)
She's not in an hurry to return to any part of the fashion industry, it would seem. When prompted by Alexa to start her own collection, Tavi retorts 'There's no designer that could do what I'm currently doing.' Which is a fair point, albeit slightly scathing of a fashion designer's often inimitable catwalk creations. At the core of it, Tavi knows exactly who she is. She's 'writing, acting [...] curating'. What is also made apparent is what she isn't doing too: fashion blogging.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.