In 2012, the final year of the original Gossip Girl, the show's costume designer reflected on changes in fashion since the show began. "And then ‘Style Rookie’ Tavi Gevinson took the helm at the wise old age of 13, teaching us all a thing or two," Eric Daman wrote in the Huffington Post of the shifting media landscape and the rise of the celebrity blogger. “Which makes me ask, is Tavi the real gossip girl?”
We may end up with a more literal answer than Eric first intended. Over the past few months, Tavi has been filming her part in HBO Max's forthcoming reimagined Gossip Girl, an extension of the first universe told through the next generation. But Tavi, who brought up the article in our interview, says even she didn't see herself in the original series, which tells the story of Manhattan's elite Upper East Siders. After all, her website Rookie — formed from the style blog she started at 11 years old — is about as far from Gossip Girl's titular mean-spirited scandalmonger as you can get.
Rookie folded in 2018, but its impact on the internet is still deeply felt. In addition to launching the careers of dozens of writers and artists, Rookie was an optimistic internet space for teenagers to feel seen and celebrated, free from adult condescension. She recently told The Cut that the site still garners hundreds of thousands of views each month, a testament to the sincere, evergreen stories you can find there.
That sincerity can be found in the next Rookie spinoff: a podcast called Life Skills, from the former Rookie column of the same name. With episodes like “How to Manage Uncertainty” and “How to Break Up With a Friend,” the podcast dives into difficult situations with nuance and specificity, defying platitudes and embracing the expertise of the writers featured.
Life Skills premieres on Audible today, January 21, 2021, and you can check out a clip below. Plus, Teen Vogue hopped on the phone with Tavi to hear all about what makes advice good, why Gossip Girl should be revisited in 2021, and how she decided to call out Karlie Kloss for her association with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.
Teen Vogue: When you first announced that Rookie would stop publishing, you wrote this great letter about feeling all kinds of emotions: gratitude, pride, awe, sadness. How do you think back on that time in 2018 when you were making that decision?
Tavi Gevinson: In some ways, it was a year or two of decision-making. I was trying to find a future for Rookie in so many different ways, and I know that by the time I made the decision to just fold it instead, I definitely knew it was the right decision. I think I felt kind of duped, or like there should have been a way to know that was the right decision almost as soon as things had become challenging? I was sort of like, I just wasted all this time trying to make it work. Now, looking back, it’s abundantly clear to me that I had to go through that whole process, trying to fundraise, trying to sell it, trying to find a partner — all of these different things. As sad as I still am that it couldn’t live on in that form, the decision to fold it when I did has been affirmed over and over. I’ve also been able to feel gratitude for the process it took to reach that decision. It’s just so clear now that I couldn’t have come to that decision any other way. I really needed to exhaust those other efforts.
And it’s also great to see that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing, I can do a one off Rookie project like this one, without all of the responsibilities that come with running a publication day-to-day and keeping a business going. I thought the only way to have community was if Rookie continued — it’s so clear to me now that that’s not true, and so many things are not as black and white as I thought.
TV: Obviously you have the podcast, and you have many other career things going on in your life. How are you thinking about success and goals and ambition now, especially after the year everyone has had?
TG: Well in one of the episodes in Life Skills, “How to Manage Uncertainty,” the writer Dylan Tupper Rupert talks about what it would be like to think in terms of values instead of goals. I think it can be really helpful to think very practically and just go, what do I want my days to look like? Do I want to be writing? Do I want to be working with other people? All of those kinds of questions. But her saying that and talking about that and working on the episode with her, really helped me take that advice to heart. I literally, in the summer, did what she talks about in the episode and made a list of values that are important to me and much more constant and reliable than a job or any kind of material possession. That has shaped a lot of the way I think about goals and trying instead to orient myself toward the things that are important to me day-to-day. The kinds of experiences that are important to me to feel day-to-day, instead of just trying to achieve and finish things and check things off of a list.
TV: What about “Life Skills” did you think would translate well to a podcast? Why is this the Rookie column that’s getting this treatment?
TG: It really came out of thinking about what I thought Rookie’s strengths were. Obviously there’s lots of advice online, a lot of advice columns I love where people answer specific questions readers have about their own lives. There’s also a lot of general self-care and self-help content out there. I always really loved the advice on Rookie where it felt like a combination of a personal essay, with someone reflecting on their own experience and using the details of their experience to tell the story of their own value system, or an idea, how they came to deal with certain issues in a certain way. And then also, not resorting to platitudes, and being very specific.
TV: That seems so crucial, when we’re bombarded with Instagram-y inspirational posts. How do you parse out what’s real when you’re crafting these episodes?
TG: That was something I thought Rookie was uniquely good at, and also something we hadn’t done in an audio form before. We had a podcast a few years ago, but it was more interviews and bite-size versions of segments like “Life Skills,” or another advice column we had called “Ask a Grown.” I like the intimacy of having people read this kind of work. In terms of editing the episodes and trying to stay away from platitudes, that is what’s so wonderful about longform writing, you know? Instagram kind of invites reductive thinking, because it rewards content that is sound-bite-y and slogan-y and visual. I mean it’s a visual medium. So I feel like the way around that was — not that platitudes can’t have some truth to them, the way cliches can — I didn’t have to worry about this because everyone’s writing was so detailed and nuanced to begin with. With editing any kind of writing, there are certain parts you need people to unpack or be more specific about. But I think the humanness of a person reading their own work, four minutes at a time, allowed for us to be very intentional and consider things from all angles and try to anticipate possible questions a listener could have to the best of our abilities. And naturally you end up with something that is more in-depth.
TV: I was going back through the Rookie archives, and I found an old edition of Friend Crush, where the two friends talked about how much they bonded over Gossip Girl. One of them talked about dressing up like Blair Waldorf to get the confidence to nail an orchestra audition. To me that kind of speaks to the fun of the show — what do you think teenage you would say about you being in the new Gossip Girl?
TG: Oh my god, I love that you found that. “Friend Crush” was so good. Whoa. Well, I think teen me would be really excited. The show started in 2007, I started my blog in 2008. That moment in fashion was… actually our costume designer wrote something at the time for Huffington Post about Gossip Girl and fashion bloggers and me, and how the internet would be the future of fashion. So I think younger me would be excited. The problem with having so much of my adolescence documented online is, I think it’s also pretty clear that maybe at the time the first version of the show was on… I was such a little weirdo. I do think there was a part of me that watched that show but also felt like I couldn’t see myself in it, because it’s so aspirational and so much about the lives of these people at an elite school. I’m really excited for people to see this reimagining because it’s still super juicy and fun, but it also is maybe a little bit more for the small weirdo that I was at the time. It’s also very clever about what that kind of privilege looks like now, when so many young people are politically active and galvanized. I’m excited for people to see it because it’s very hard to keep secrets about. I’m tired of having to speak in code about it.
TV: You mention the aspirational element of the original show, and it’s interesting because as a viewer, it always felt like you’re supposed to sort of see through the wealthy veneer and root for them, but also not root for them. Why do you think Gossip Girl is a story that should be revisited in 2021?
TG: It’s funny to watch the original now and notice how many things would get a lot of pushback now. Even just to be watching a show that centers on the love lives of a handful of rich, white teenagers on the Upper East Side is now a controversial premise — not that it wasn’t always about that, but certainly, the cultural mood has shifted since then. Without giving too much away, I think that it's a good time to [reimagine it]. For one, this cast and the storylines are much more inclusive. Obviously, it’s still that school and that world, and there’s still a lot of wealth. I think this reimagining takes its own characters to task for how they choose to wield the power they have.
But also, when you think about when the original was on, and Gossip Girl was a blog where people sent tips, voyeurism online is a million times more extreme now. I think that… it is just so hard to say this without giving anything away... it's how rapidly public opinion can shift now. How people can use social media to infringe on people’s privacy, or hold people accountable. What it means for so many more people to have a platform, and to have access to people who they admire or who they think should be held accountable for whatever position they occupy in the world. All of these things are going on in the reimagining. Especially now, in the way that many of us are inside all the time and so much of my life really has shifted to the virtual space, I think it is a really good time to ask what the project of the original Gossip Girl looks like now, when millions more people are doing a version of what Gossip Girl does. In the original, it was about gossip, and now morality is so much more a part of how people use social media, and what people ask of celebrities or anyone with a platform. All of that is very cleverly looked at in this show.
TV: Speaking of exactly that, people wielding power and using their platforms, why was it important to you to share some words for Karlie Kloss after she said she “tried” to talk to Jared and Ivanka in a tweet last week?
TG: So, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are two advisers in one of the most destructive, violently racist presidencies in recent memory. It was just reported that Karlie and Josh bought a house by them in Miami. Publicly, Karlie says, “Oh, we have different political beliefs, who doesn’t disagree with their family members?” And I definitely have talked about this with people who are like, “Well what are you supposed to do with your in-laws who are Trump voters?” But we’re not talking about Trump voters. We’re talking about two top advisers to a white supremacist who totally failed over the past four years to address the growing threat of right-wing extremism. We’ve seen hate crimes rise exponentially since he became president.
With Ivanka, it seemed like people had this hope like, “Maybe she’s going to bring him back from the brink.” And I find myself in conversations with people who feel that way about Karlie, too. People say, “Well, maybe she talks to them in private.” [Karlie has said this publicly as well.] That’s remarkably generous in my view … It’s just not enough to claim that behind the scenes you’re having conversations where you’re trying to sway these people. I cannot imagine having the political power she does and not wanting to use it to actually convey what a threat these people are, and how guilty they are for so many cruel policies, and so much violence. The only way I can imagine having that political power and not wanting to use it is if you don’t really believe what you say you believe, or you care more about wealth and status, or maybe being friendly to your family members. But honestly, people have left families for much less.
In a follow-up email after the interview, Tavi elaborated on her statement: "Because I know she's listening, because she restricted me on Instagram. I also talk about it because if she incorporates progressive causes into her brand, I think this stuff should be part of her brand, too. But mostly, I want people to understand that by saying, "Who doesn't disagree with their family about politics?" when that means two senior advisors to Trump, she makes Jared and Ivanka's politics appear harmless. But we are dealing with violent, right-wing extremism because white nationalism has been treated as a legitimate political view. It should be clearly identified as hate."
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