A Sweet Bitch of the Week Who Is Less Than Five Feet Tall: Tavi Gevinson

I really like Tavi Gevinson. Tavi is a fourteen year old girl who writes the crippling-feelings-of-inadequacy-inducing fashion blog, Style Rookie. I know that this post is really late to the Tavi hype and that there are probably lots of things that could be said about Tavi's privelege because her parents own heaps of tripods and her dad seems to have a lot of time to take her to Fashion Week events, but I just really like her.

I like her because she is smart and her posts are funny. I like it when she writes about feminism and Hole and when she takes on Seventeen Magazine. I really like it when she blogs for a week at Jezebel and talks about Daria and labels for different models. I really, really like it when she fiercely talks about how photographer Terry Richardson is a creepy and manipulative pervert. (If you need clarification on either Terry's creepy manipulation or on his perversion, perhaps because you don't spend a large amount of your free time trawling through feminism on the internet, then you should read the bits and pieces of the Jezebel exposé.) Tavi writes about Terry:

"I think we’re supposed to find significance in how ironic and funny it is, because, Ha-ha! There’s that Crazy Dude Terry with his signature glasses and flannel and perviness again! Ha-ha! That Terry, what a Crazy Dude, with his signature glasses and flannel and perviness! Again! He’s become this weird cultural icon whose “thing” it is is to be a perv. In these kinds of photos where he’s included, he’s the real model, and the girl who was hired is merely his prop, his trophy, a nameless, faceless girl that accentuates Crazy Dude Terry’s image but doesn’t get an image of her own."

So it was when I read that, that I knew that I really, seriously liked Tavi.

And then I saw a photo of her wearing this huge, ridiculously giant Stephen Jones hair bow and I knew that I fucking loved Tavi.

[Photos from this post on Tavi's blog.]

It is the best and the biggest and the brightest hair bow that I have ever seen. And I fucking love hair bows. And just as I was marvelling about the the bow some more, I found out that heaps of people hated it! Mainly, The bow pissed off Paula Reed, the Editor of Grazia Magazine, because Tavi wore it while she was sitting in front of her at the Christian Dior haute couture show in Paris. Paula Reed then complained about it a bit on Twitter. Then Jezebel wrote about how it was pretty rude for Reed to tweet a picture of the bow to her followers, especially when:

[Taken from Jezebel.]

Oh Tavi, you sweet bitch of the week.

So I basically love Tavi for wearing being so brave and smart and for wearing her bow and then joking about it on her blog. Especially because some people are always gong to be calling for some kind of backlash, because it's not like you can ever publicly succeed without seeing your inevitable fall from grace approaching in the rear view mirror. Just ask Britney. When the bloggers and the marketing managers for Selfridges and the journalists from Elle (and lest we forget one crazy internet lady who thinks she has the medical expertise to diagnose Tavi with Aspergers on the internet) seem so hell bent on instigating a backlash against a clever and sassy and courageous young lady who is only just starting high school, I am so fucking glad that Tavi exists and that she wore the bow, and that now she is wearing these ridiculous pants.