Tavi Gevinson has some strong words for Scott Schuman. You may remember she was criticised by The Satorialist blogger on the grounds that she was too young to write her influential blog, but now she's biting back.
‘That young people don’t have valid thoughts about the world because they haven’t been alive long enough is sadly a very popular and, frankly, unoriginal sentiment,’ Tavi, 19, tells The Talks. ‘‘When I think about that time, I was just responding to the world around me. And I was perceptive enough that I felt like I could make connections to things in my life.’
It was in the same publication in 2011 that Scott claimed the success of Tavi’s blog – which she started when she was 11 – was a ‘bit of a conspiracy by established print media’, who had wanted to demonstrate that blogs were so unimportant, they could be written by ‘a bunch of 12-year-olds.’ He opined that whilst it was ‘great’ Tavi wrote for like-minded ‘kids around her age’, she could only ever comment on art ‘and stuff’ in an abstract way.
Addressing the criticism head on, Tavi responds, ‘I don’t think it was abstract. And I am basically skeptical of any adults who have those kinds of things to say about young people because it seems to always very transparently stem from fear and insecurity. And to be honest, the fact [is] that he’s shorter than me in real life.’
A sparky response from the writer, though of course she’d deliver on chutzpah: a teenage blogger who, at 13 years old, sat front row at Paris fashion week, would have learned – pretty fast – how to stand tall. And the proof is in the pudding.