The next chapter
mit
Tavi Gevinson
A digital pioneer at 11, TAVI GEVINSON spearheaded the shift from ‘blogging’ to ‘big business’ with her thought-provoking teen magazine and style platform, Rookie. Now a bona fide feminist figurehead, actor and writer, she tells PHOEBE LOVATT how her starring role in the Gossip Girl reboot is a diversifying move into the mainstream
Tavi Gevinson is feeling a little frazzled at the moment. The 25-year-old’s long-time home of New York is getting back into full swing, and “suddenly friends are in town, family is in town. It’s wild,” she tells me, eyes widening, as she sits behind the desk of her cozy Brooklyn home office. “I’m totally overdoing it.”
And it’s not like the writer and actor has spent lockdown sitting in front of Netflix. In addition to launching a podcast with Audible called Life Skills by Rookie, Gevinson has been working on her first book, which she defines hesitantly as a collection of “memoir essays… I’ve probably been overthinking that a bit,” she admits. Then there’s also her role in the much-anticipated HBO Max reboot of Gossip Girl, which charts the private-school dramas – and high-octane outfits – of a group of wealthy Upper East Side teens.
She is feeling slightly nervous about the forthcoming reception of what will be her biggest TV role to date, but says that the show’s mainstream reach was also a large part of its appeal. Having spent the past few years acting in acclaimed, but relatively niche New York theater productions, she was lured “by the idea of doing something that I knew people would watch,” she says. “It’s really exciting to be part of something that will be a splashy pop-culture moment.”
Gevinson’s prodigious career has thus far been synonymous with her youth: she launched her hugely influential fashion blog Style Rookie at the age of 11, and followed with the online teen magazine Rookie when she was 15. Because of this, long-time fans might be surprised to discover that she plays a teacher, rather than a student, in the Gossip Girl remake. In a twist Gevinson describes as “kind of meta and fun”, her character Kate Keller resurrects the show’s eponymous social-media identity as ‘GossipGirl2.0’ in a bid to regain control over her increasingly conceited and power-drunk pupils. “When I first heard about the show, I was like, ‘I can’t play teenagers anymore! I need to at least pretend that I’m an adult,’” she laughs. “My agent was like: ‘Don’t worry, nobody’s asking you [to do] that.’”
“I’m really ENJOYING being old enough to have the vocabulary to talk about things I experienced when I was YOUNGER, which I didn’t totally UNDERSTAND at the time”
Being part of a show charting the trials and tribulations of teendom has left Gevinson contemplating her own past with new-found perspective. “With Rookie being over, it’s not that I’m necessarily interested in writing or thinking about being a teenager anymore at all,” she says (the website ceased for financial reasons in 2018). “But I am really enjoying being old enough to have the vocabulary to talk about things I experienced when I was younger, which I didn’t totally understand at the time – like I did in the Britney thing.”
‘The Britney thing’ is Britney Spears Was Never in Control – a viral essay Gevinson wrote for The Cut in February this year. Partly a response to the harrowing New York Times documentary about Spears’ conservatorship, the piece also revealed Gevinson’s traumatic experiences at the hands of various exploitative men – specifically one she describes as a “hapless, insecure, wealthy, much-older-than-me man” (he remains unnamed), with whom she was in an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship with in her late teens.
“You can never FEEL 100 percent prepared to publish something – or KNOW that you’ll feel GREAT once it’s out”
It’s a raw, thought-provoking read; one that delves into the insidious power dynamics at play when young girls find themselves in the harsh glare of the public spotlight. “It’s not something I would have been capable of writing or publishing sooner than I did,” Gevinson reflects. “But when I saw the [Britney] documentary; when I saw the way people were talking about it, it activated my desire to respond. It felt larger than my own experience and more about patterns in the way people treat young women who they want to see as precocious.”
After more than a decade spent sharing her thoughts with the world, Gevinson has learnt that “you can never feel 100 percent prepared to publish something – or know that you’ll feel great once it’s out. But I think you can know that you’ve worked on it as much as you can before it has to go out there,” she says. “You know, [you] run it through your own filters enough, just going [through it] line by line and making sure everything you say is truthful.” Certain topics, including her family and anything too “fresh and unprocessed”, remain strictly off-limits.
“Going out there and DOING the same thing every night; really BEING in my body – that’s a very HAPPY place for me”
Having once described scrolling through Instagram to the point where she felt like she was “crawling out of [her] skin”, Gevinson says her relationship to social media these days is more akin to food poisoning. In the same way one might develop an aversion to shellfish after eating a dodgy prawn, Gevinson’s body now “knows that [Instagram] makes me feel so bad that I’ve kind of lost interest”. After Gossip Girl comes out, she senses her days on the platform might be numbered. “I would like to take advantage of the modicum of control I have over my own little page that people might be looking at more, but it’s also a losing battle to try to control people’s responses to anything you do.”
If Style Rookie had launched 10 years later, it would likely have been an Instagram account instead of a blog. Currently, though, Gevinson’s approach to personal style is mostly about getting as far away from a homogenized aesthetic as possible. “I think I’m just trying to not go for the most obvious combinations of things in my closet,” she says. “I’m trying to have my antenna tuned to whatever actually creates some kind of movement inside of me, rather than my numb robot brain being like: ‘Yes, that looks like something I would wear.’”
On a recent excavation of her storage unit, she “rediscovered a lot of the clothes I wore as a teenager – most of which, I’m like, ‘It’s time to move on, I can’t dress like I’m in Grease anymore’,” she laughs. Clothes are still “a source of joy” in her life, but Gevinson seems relieved to have left her time as a voice of the industry behind her. When I suggest that it’s her writing and acting that people tend to think of when they hear her name these days, she seems quietly pleased. “I hope that’s true.”
“Someone once told me you should ALWAYS have friends who are 10 years OLDER than you and 10 years YOUNGER than you, just to maintain perspective”
She will spend the rest of the summer working on her book while shooting the remaining scenes of Gossip Girl. When the show wraps, she’s straight into rehearsals for a musical called Assassins that she was cast in before the pandemic hit. “[Stage acting] does a lot for me,” she says. “Going out there and doing the same thing every night; really being in my body – that’s a very happy place for me.” She sometimes worries that she’s “losing parts of her brain” by jumping between artistic disciplines. “But I have to imagine it’s all feeding each other.” As someone who has achieved more at 25 than most do at twice her age, how does Gevinson plan for the future?
“It’s very daunting to think ahead,” she admits. “All the things I want to make are movies and TV, but that industry totally hinges on changes in technology, which are so unpredictable.” In the meantime, she’s just trying to enjoy her free time as much as possible. After our interview she’s heading straight to a Nan Goldin show with some friends – her New York social circle is a broad bunch of intellectuals, actors and designers. “Someone once told me you should always have friends who are 10 years older than you and 10 years younger than you, just to maintain perspective.”
Among her mentors, she includes the critic Hilton Als, the playwright Kenneth Lonergan and the singer-songwriter Stevie Nicks, who has sent her various tokens of friendship over the years, including a blanket, gold Chanel shoes and “a gold moon necklace that [Nicks] gives to lots of women she takes into her orbit”. Having wrung “as much insight as possible out of people who have been doing this for longer than me”, Gevinson feels grateful to be able to continue the lineage.
“When I was going through the things I had in storage the other day, finding all this stuff that Rookie readers gave me and putting together packages of clothes to give to other people, I was like, ‘Man, I’m so glad to feel like I exist in a community of creative people supporting each other’,” she reflects. “It’s easy to feel self-conscious or stressed out around publishing something or the show coming out, but that community is why I’m able to do what I love.”