Waifish little whisps living the dream...

While gorging on Style.com's video footage of New York Fashion Week in September, I kept noticing this waifish little whisp of a thing that could’ve been a girl or a boy, I couldn’t tell. This fresh faced imp was getting interviewed from the front row of dozens of runway shows. At the bottom of the screen, instead of the usual title of “Fashion Journalist” or “Fashion Designer” it just said “Fashion Rookie”. Then when I decided to go back and figure this iddy biddy enigma out, I couldn’t remember the kid’s name or figure out which videos the moppet had appeared in.

So when I accidentally ended up on the Teen Vogue site today (after clicking the wrong link on a blog I follow) I was pretty excited to see the prodigal child (a girl, apparently) with her name on the front page. Mystery solved.

So her name is Tavi Gevinson and she’s 13, and she writes a blog called Style Rookie. Apparently the Mulleavy sisters of the Rodarte label discovered her and whisked her away into a fairy tale world of fashion. And now, according to the article on Teen Vogue, she’s the new face of Target.

So naturally, needing to overwhelm envy with awe, I browsed her blog. It is obviously written by a 13 year old, albeit a very intelligent and culturally literate 13 year old. She’s all at once confident and self-deprecating. I see the appeal; she reminds me of myself at that age and I imagine a lot of people feel the same way. Still, the self consciousness palpable in her writing has clearly been tinged by her 15 minutes. So I went further back into her blog archives, and I found an effortlessness that was probably what attracted all of her readers in the first place. Not to mention her early self-portraits lack the “deer in headlights” look inherent to so many of the shots of her taken at shows.

So this pre-teen is definitely pretty cool although still entirely mysterious.  I hope the fashion industry doesn’t make a habit of this. Whatever makes this weird girl anomaly cute and quaint will make the next one trite. Kudos to this one, though. I’m jealous as hell, but equally impressed.