Small and Ferocious

Tavi Gevinson started her fashion blog, Style Rookie, when she was eleven years old—posting outfit photos and stream-of-consciousness dispatches from a bedroom in Oak Park, Illinois. By 2011 she was fifteen and had spent three years being scrutinized by an industry that couldn’t decide whether to take her seriously or dismiss her as a novelty. The "creepy little girl" framing was always partly their problem, not hers: her taste ran toward the old and the odd, the slightly unsettling, the things adults had already decided weren’t fashionable anymore. That September she launched Rookie, a magazine for teenage girls that managed to be neither patronizing nor aggressively cool—just genuinely good. The novelty framing never quite fit her, and eventually everyone stopped trying to make it.