The Polaroid

Tavi Gevinson figured out something that everyone on the internet wanted to figure out: how to have actual cultural influence at sixteen. Fashion blogs were everywhere, but she became the one person fashion mattered in front of. Front row at Paris. Lunches with Anna Wintour. Magazine covers. It still feels remarkable, even now.

Someone asked me what I’d give her as a gift—this was during the Rookie Mag era, when she was publishing all these intimate essays and photo series that somehow reached millions of teenage girls. Not something off a luxury brand website. Something that would actually serve what she was making. I thought about the photographs she was using, the aesthetic she was building, and I kept coming back to a vintage Polaroid Sun 600 SLM from the 1980s. A used one, autofocus, flash intact, the kind of thing you find in estate sale boxes. Not better equipment, just different. Specific constraints. A particular texture and quality of light.

There’s something about hunting for a gift like that instead of just ordering something mass-produced online. You end up finding something with actual history—made and owned by people before you. It costs less. It somehow means more, even though it shouldn’t by any rational logic.