Tavi Debuts New Site, Rookie

After sitting front row at shows, collaborating with Rodarte, writing for Harper's Bazaar and receiving the highest of praise from Lady Gaga, Tavi Gevinson has finally graduated from blog-dom and debuted her own website, Rookie.

The site, launched today, is aimed at teenage girls, an audience the 15-year-old style blogger knows well. In accordance with its audience's schedule, Women's Wear Daily reports, new articles will be posted three times a day: after school ("After School Special"), after dinner ("Dinner Time") and around bedtime ("Sweet Dreams").

Rookie will also mold its content for the female high school demographic. "I felt much more strongly about in the sense of [Rookie's] potential to not only be aesthetically pleasing and have funny, clever writing, but to actually touch on some experiences," Tavi told The Cut, explaining how the site intends to reflect real girls' lives.

In the site's first post, Tavi articulated Rookie's raison d'être in an "Editor's Letter":

Rookie is not your guide to Being a Teen. It is not a pamphlet on How to Be a Young Woman. (If it were, it would be published by American Girl and your aunt would’ve given it to you in the fifth grade.) It is, quite simply, a bunch of writing and art we like and believe in. While there’s always danger in generalizing a whole group of people, I do think some experiences are somewhat universal to being a teenager, specifically a female one. Rookie is a place to make the best of the beautiful pain and cringe-worthy awkwardness of being an adolescent girl.

Along those lines, the site will focus more on quirky, timeless experiences and phenomena and less on trends, similar to its inspiration, Jane Pratt's Sassy.

"[The editors at Sassy] were honest about celebrities and didn't pretend everyone was happy all the time ... and really praised people not because they were famous but because they were cool and creative. That goes for a lot of the people we'll be featuring," Tavi said at a Sassy-inspired event in July.

"I think that we want to avoid focusing on the more interchangeable superficialities, like bands or kinds of clothes... because ultimately it will be subversive just in its honesty and tone."

While Sassy and its famous editor, Jane Pratt, served as models for Tavi, her site is not a formal collaboration with Pratt, as had been previously reported. The blogger told WWD in August, "It was just that I want to have full control, and it’s important to me that we’re independent."

Tavi also said that she and Jane Pratt hated each other, but we're pretty sure she was joking about that one.

Tell us what you think of the brand-new Rookie below.

Comments

[Carol Harvey]

01:31 PM on 10/20/2011

Impressive. I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. Really, it must be great to be so focused and confident! Not to be picky here, but Tavi needs a make-up lesson. The "wings" at the outer corners of her eyes are so old timey. But then, maybe this was the point (no pun intended).

[Brian Gorrell]

05:57 PM on 09/07/2011

A future Anna Wintour

[GraniteSkyline]

09:24 AM on 09/07/2011

Good luck with your new venture Tavi! And hurry up and turn 18 so you can replace Nuclear Wintour at Vogue!

[medicim]

03:05 PM on 09/06/2011

I doubt that this is an independent project.

[rini]

07:38 AM on 09/06/2011

Only fifteen? Why do people like this always make me feel like Comic Book Guy???

"Oohh, I've wasted my life... "

[Asuigeneris1]

07:47 AM on 09/06/2011

It's the internet/Youtube era...as long as someone puts something out there and anyone who has any clout sees it, you can be a media darling in a day.

[Fortune27]

11:44 AM on 09/06/2011

I have the feeling that Tavi is one of those rare individuals few who arrived knowing what she wanted her life to be and probably popped out of her mommy's tummy with pen, paper in and a Vogue magazine in hand.

The rest of us are on a different timeline. So, not to fret, you are not alone.