From the Magazine
July/August 2021 Issue

XOXO, Tavi

Fashion veteran, media mogul, Broadway actor, and star of the Gossip Girl reboot, Tavi Gevinson—famous for more than half of her life—shows no signs of scaling back her ambitions.
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FUTURE SO BRIGHT
Photographed in New York City on April 29, 2021. Top by Collina Strada; necklace and pendant by Foundrae; sunglasses by Nanushka.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY NICK RILEY BENTHAM; STYLED BY NICOLE CHAPOTEAU.

Tavi Gevinson spent the pandemic year in ways that might feel familiar. She moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn, adopted a dog, worked on her book, panicked at least once on a video call, and appeared on a few podcasts.

She also spent it in some more unusual ways. She filmed her role in the Gossip Girl reboot, out this month, and published two essays, her first significant pieces of writing since shutting down Rookie, the online magazine for teen girls that placed her in the media vanguard, in 2018. Multihyphenates are a dime a dozen in this economy. But Gevinson, now more than a decade removed from the clever middle schooler sitting front row at fashion shows, manages to stand solidly on each subsequent hyphen she adds.

“I was once at a party when I was still doing Rookie and someone asked me what I do. I said, ‘Oh, I’m a writer and actor, and I also edit this publication that I founded,’ ” she told me. “And David Geffen, who I had not met, appeared seemingly out of nowhere and went, ‘One day, you’re probably going to have to choose.’ And then, just like that, he disappeared.”

You get the sense that Gevinson has a million of these kinds of stories—stories that imply she’s observing and being observed while square in the center of things. She has spent her short life on every side of the image. She’s created her own persona and published it herself and played characters made for her. She has been regularly profiled in major magazines since she was a child, her selfhood sketched out and presented by others at every major stage of her life. She’s interviewed interesting characters and written profiles herself too, as she did with Taylor Swift, a person she calls a friend. Many of her other friends are working actors, but many of them are working writers.

She doesn’t have to figure out how to be the subject of a magazine piece on a nice day in April in the sculpture garden behind the Brooklyn Museum, just days after her 25th birthday, when we meet for bagels. She can relax into it a bit and just “have a conversation,” she says, dropping her voice low to signal platitude incoming. “But also having interviewed and profiled people, I’m aware of your needs,” she says. She really is. Besides the bagel that she buys me, Gevinson gives me two cigarettes over the course of four hours, and will, when we pack up to part ways, provide me with some hand sanitizer. In these moments she seems more writer-editor Tavi Gevinson, less stage and screen star. But before I can chant “Gooble gobble, one of us,” I remember that she’s not. Not entirely at least.

Clothing by Alessandra Rich; sandals by Salvatore Ferragamo; necklace by Hermès; bag by Valentino Garavani.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY NICK RILEY BENTHAM; STYLED BY NICOLE CHAPOTEAU.
Clothing, boots, and earrings by Chanel.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY NICK RILEY BENTHAM; STYLED BY NICOLE CHAPOTEAU.

Her ever-widening spheres of influence began with a relatively small one. In 2008, when she was almost 12, she started a fashion blog, Style Rookie, after a friend’s older sister showed Gevinson her own. She posted her outfits online, usually taken in the backyard at her home in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago. When one of her favorite designers, Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, made a collection for H&M, she wrote a dopey rap about her. It circled up through the fashion blogs until it captured the attention of some top-tier designers.

The sisters Mulleavy of Rodarte sent her clothes. Pop magazine put her on its cover in 2009 and Kawakubo invited her to Tokyo as the guest of honor at Comme des Garçons’ holiday party. (Her father, an English teacher at the time, would accompany her on these trips.) She met Karl Lagerfeld and he complimented her look, which at the time was the blue hair special. Harper’s Bazaar hired her to review the spring collections in 2009. John Galliano flew her to Paris for the Dior haute couture show in early 2010, where she famously irked some establishment editors who were sitting behind her and her enormous Stephen Jones bow.

At the time, fashion shows were the domain of designers, buyers, and legacy media with their professional critics, but the internet was threatening to democratize everything. Stunts had a way of commanding attention in the new free-for-all attention economy, and it wasn’t totally nuts for the fashion media to wonder if this kid was some kind of industry plant. One Elle editor said she was interested in Gevinson in the way she was interested in JT LeRoy, the literary hoaxer who scandalized that other niche scene in 2005.

Gevinson chalks it up to a more cynical time on the internet, a time when children were fair game: “My friend jokes that I walked so Barron Trump could run.”

But no matter, really. By the time The New Yorker’s Lizzie Widdicombe had written the definitive profile on Gevinson—fashion wunderkind—in 2010, she had already moved on from fashion. That year, she spoke at Ideacity in Canada and mentioned she’d like to start some kind of online magazine by and for teens in the spirit of Jane Pratt’s Sassy. She received 3,000 or so emails after that, including a very important one from Anaheed Alani, who was then fact-checking at The New York Times but offered to leave to help start this thing. Together—and with Pratt’s blessing and the advice of Ira Glass, Alani’s husband at the time—they made Rookie. She edited work by writers still in high school and managed a team of adults many years her senior, and it became one of the only safe, uncynical, and unpatronizing places for girls on the internet as well as a kind of media property darling that adults working in the industry spoke about in reverent tones.

After some years establishing Rookie, she reclaimed a childhood penchant for acting, got an agent, and got cast in Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth alongside Kieran Culkin and Michael Cera, as well as Nicole Holofcener’s Enough Said, which put her onscreen with James Gandolfini, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Catherine Keener. Winona Ryder bequeathed to her a pair of gloves that Audrey Hepburn had given her. She now keeps them in a fireproof safe along with her journals and a hard drive containing the Rookie archive.

By the time both New York Magazine’s Amy Larocca and T Magazine’s Emily Witt had written the definitive profiles of Tavi Gevinson—teen media maven turned promising actor—she was already settling into a whole new life in New York. That was in 2014, and she wouldn’t officially decide to shut down Rookie for another four years, but she understood something important then: She kept getting older, and the site’s core demographic stayed the same age.

This explains in part how one can reboot a splashy teen soap not even a decade after its death, which is how Gevinson found herself with the run of the city during the long COVID winter. Production on the new Gossip Girl began in November, so while New York shut down for a second wave, she and her castmates shot at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of the City of New York, which stood in for prep school. They saw Webster Hall with the lights on, poor things. It was all very Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler for the Juul and Clandestino set.

Clothing by Emilio Pucci; sandals by Salvatore Ferragamo.PHOTOGRAPHS BY NICK RILEY BENTHAM; STYLED BY NICOLE CHAPOTEAU.

Joshua Safran, the series showrunner and executive producer, has known Gevinson for years and considered only her for the role of Kate Keller, described in the taciturn press materials with one word: “ambitious.” On set, he, the boss, finds himself a little shaken in her presence. “There’s actually text chains between me and other actors on the show about how we’re intimidated by her, even though they’re also her friends,” he says with a laugh. “And it’s because she shows up and it’s effortless. The performance is effortless. Her ability to be present in the moment is effortless.”

Shows aimed at teens are often ruthlessly of the moment. While Gossip Girl 1.0 drew from an Upper East Side-focused riff on 2006-era Perez Hilton, the current reboot’s characters are living in a world shaped by that and also #MeToo, the #MeToo backlash, cancel culture, media shrink, et al.

“Here’s the thing about teens. The turnover is quick.”

Gevinson, however, is not.

“She has this thing where I can’t place her temporally,” Safran said. “And what I mean is, is she 60 and the wisest professor at, you know, Smith, or is she perpetually 15 and asking the questions that you haven’t yet learned you’re not ‘supposed to ask’? She’s like this time traveler from the future, who’s here to investigate and discuss and pore over all of what it means to be alive in this moment.”

Clothing, boots, and earrings by Chanel.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY NICK RILEY BENTHAM; STYLED BY NICOLE CHAPOTEAU.

He met with Gevinson in person to tell her about the concept he had in mind, which he did instead of sending her the script, the typical way an actor first encounters a role. (Almost everything about the show has been very “burn after reading then swallow the key” for reasons that will hopefully pay off soon.) She jumped. She understood the character immediately because she’s a writer too, and Safran didn’t have to explain every choice.

Her character may have some superficial overlaps with Gevinson’s own story. In Safran’s experience, this can scare an actor away from a part for fear of an audience confusing the two for one. She believes this role could be, at best, an Easter egg for the real Tavi-heads. If you know, you know that the actor who plays Kate was once a niche-famous teenage website editor around when the original Gossip Girl ended. But it isn’t necessarily an extension of Rookie. These kids, the ones reflected in the show, have little to do with those kids, the real ones whose work she edited and who consumed the work. The teenager is not a monolith, just a recent invention that still manages to enjoy an outsize allure in the cultural imagination.

“At the same time that I’ve benefited from this cultural obsession with youth that became such a big part of my story, I feel very aware of the traps of it,” Gevinson told me. “The fact I gained a kind of public persona at the same time that I was on the threshold of tweendom…the two are really tied up in my mind—the sacrifice of growing up and then the sacrifice of being publicly known in some way that you can’t really reverse.”

Clothing by Wales Bonner; shoes by Hermès.PHOTOGRAPHS BY NICK RILEY BENTHAM; STYLED BY NICOLE CHAPOTEAU.

Gevinson speaks in reams of dialogue that feel as though they could be copied and pasted into the novel I hope she writes one day, after she finishes that book of essays she’s working on. But in conversation, the delivery is prone to starts and stops that start again—a sign of a careful thinker and a considered speaker who is used to reading her own words in print. Her forehead works as she stares into a middle distance. Sometimes the space between the last word and the next is a gap so wide, you fear you won’t make it to the other side, and you think maybe she fell down it too. But she hasn’t, and actually she’ll reach down and grab your hand and bring you along.

“Once you’re [known],” she says, finally, “You can walk away and accept a huge kind of disconnect or you can keep redefining yourself and fight the losing battle of trying to gain control over how you are seen.” (Not interested in picking one or the other of anything, she has made choices along the “in between.” Like, for example, “I wouldn’t have done Gossip Girl if maintaining a certain kind of anonymity and a level of publicness that I feel pretty comfortable with was more important to me than doing the show. I also could have had a reality show when I was a teenager if I wanted to and I didn’t.”)

The question of control was central to the essay she published in New York in late February, about the documentary Framing Britney Spears as well as Gevinson’s own experience with teenage precocity navigating circles of power and fame. The documentary, which seemed to make the case that Spears was in control of herself and her image at the age of 16, frustrated Gevinson, who posted “a little rant” about it on Instagram. An editor at New York reached out to ask if she would write something; Gevinson said no but then began waking up in the middle of the night with fully formed sentences in her head. (Have you ever been roused from sleep by syntax? It’s hard to ignore.)

“You can either do this now and see how it feels,” she told herself. “Or you can continue to obsessively think about this stuff and continue to wonder what it would be like to share it and let that continue to eat away at you.”

Clothing by Miu Miu; earrings by Alexander McQueen; sandals by Salvatore Ferragamo.PHOTOGRAPHS BY NICK RILEY BENTHAM; STYLED BY NICOLE CHAPOTEAU.

By couching it in cultural criticism, she was able to write publicly about her own experiences as a recent high school graduate in New York and the much older man who left her with trauma that she’s still working through. She didn’t name him or any of the other abusers she’d known in the piece for reasons she carefully noted therein. It was not supposed to be a whodunit, and she’s pleased it didn’t become such after the piece was published. A week after our conversation, she sent me an email explaining how she was thinking about the essay’s reception, especially with regard to the asks of her readers:

“For anyone to defy the terms would signal to me that they are giving preference to the avatar of me as a victim, to whom they are prescribing their idea of justice, over the real person who made real requests on the page. Who these things actually happened to.

Clothing, shoes, and necklace by Dior; sunglasses by Lowercase. 
Throughout: hair products by Bumble and Bumble; makeup products by Chanel.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY NICK RILEY BENTHAM; STYLED BY NICOLE CHAPOTEAU.

“I was pleased my readers understood that it would be unethical to defy these terms. And it would be ironic, because the issue at hand is not only consent, but fetishization. From the Jo Livingstone article I mentioned to you [“Why Are Adult Women Infatuated With Teenage Girls?” from The New Republic in 2017]: ‘We call it fetishization because it reduces these individuals to one exaggerated aspect of their identity…at the expense of the rest of the person.’ Now that I’m writing this, I see what a leap of faith it was to publish something that makes that kind of request of thousands of strangers. So although it was in reaction to the world as it is, I think it was also for the world I want to see.”

The two worlds, existing and hopefully imagined, also figured into her second essay, about working with now notorious Broadway and film producer Scott Rudin, which was met with two kinds of responses. There were those in her orbit who side-eye the unveiling of a man hiding in plain sight, calling it sanctimonious and hypocritical to suddenly turn on the guy. And there were those outside of that orbit who couldn’t understand how you work for a person like that, how you don’t extricate yourself at the very least. She saw a chance to draw those poles to each other, explaining how the dual influences of fear and careerism fostered such a situation.

“With that one, I was like, Oh, I’m actually in a position where it is to my advantage to be both, to be inside of it,” says Gevinson—the essayist who is also a stage actor, the freelance writer who also has a publicist. “Maybe I can offer some kind of insight around how this kind of culture can persist or how it’s allowed to persist.”

Clothing, shoes, and necklace by Dior; sunglasses by Lowercase. Throughout: hair products by Bumble and Bumble; makeup products by Chanel.PHOTOGRAPHS BY NICK RILEY BENTHAM; STYLED BY NICOLE CHAPOTEAU.

Lonergan, who is among Gevinson’s cast of friends but the only one who wrote This Is Our Youth, read both essays multiple times. “I’m amazed by how she’s tackling issues that are really being talked about exhaustively in public,” he says. “What I find remarkable about both those pieces is that she’s able to examine the architecture of her own thoughts, ideas about it in such a cold, analytical way and without ever losing that personal relationship to what she’s writing about. If everybody was as thoughtful and imaginative and frank about themselves and about the personal connection with some of these big things that are happening, I think we’d all be in a much better place.”

Both Lonergan and Safran have three similar things to say about Gevinson, all of which I experienced as well. First is that she has no real fealty to her age group and never really has. As Safran told me, she is as fluent in 65-year-old as she is in 45-year-old as she is in 20, and as Lonergan mentioned, has friends everywhere in between. This is rare, though maybe it shouldn’t be.

Second is that she will talk your way to a broadened mind. “New neural pathways are formed in my brain when I spend time with her,” says Safran. Says Lonergan, “She has very much informed my view of a lot of things in ways that I haven’t thought of because she is coming at it from such a different point of view.”

And third, that she can hang for hours. Lonergan laughs about the time she slept on his couch after dinner with his wife and daughter because she stayed past his bedtime and hers. Safran marvels at the time she came over and stayed for, like, eight hours, just talking to him and his husband. I kept expecting her to say she had to go and she kept not doing that, until she did, after such a long while there in the sculpture garden, our bagels a faraway memory. Time, it’s just another absolute that isn’t one for Gevinson. Just another thing that doesn’t have to define her yet if she doesn’t let it. Just another thing she has in spades that she can use to her advantage should she choose to.

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