Sassy,too

Teenage blogger Tavi Gevinson plans to start a magazine with Jane Pratt,founder and former editor of the 90s teen girl magazine Sassy.

AMANDA FORTINI

When the teenage fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson announced last November that she was joining forces with the editor Jane Pratt to start a magazine modelled after Pratts much-mourned Sassy,the blogosphere lit up with excitement. For a generation of women,Sassy with its indie ethos and straight talk about weighty topics like feminism and sex was a seminal magazine: it not only changed their expectations of media,but it also changed how they saw themselves.

Gevinson seemed the perfect choice to lend the old-media Pratt some new-media fame. Her precocious blog,Style Rookie,has,in a mere three and a half years,made her a darling of the fashion establishmentshe has written for Harpers Bazaar,sat front row at the Marc Jacobs runway show and been the subject of a profile in The New Yorker.

Despite her age,she is a connoisseur of 90s culture; she frequently writes on Style Rookie about the TV series Daria,say,or the riot grrrl movement. The two pop-culture things that influenced me aesthetically the most are Twin Peaks and Virgin Suicides, she said. She is now preparing for the first issue of her new magazine,which she has named Rookie. As it turns out,Pratt who started her own Web site,xoJane.com is not officially involved,although she will appear on the contributors page as fairy godmother.

Gevinson is no longer the gamine,grannychild of her early days but rather a doll-faced 15-year-old with contact lenses and curves. The usual adolescent totems were arranged on every surface books,album covers,figurines,so many of them from decades past that the room had a curiously preserved quality. Were trying to avoid getting too 90s nostalgic, Gevinson said about her new venture.

Yet her interest in the nineties decade makes sense. It was,arguably,the heyday of realistic cultural portrayals of the agony and ecstasy of the teenage years: so instance,The Wonder Years,and,yes,Sassy.

And if Gevinson has another area of expertise,an anthropological major to her 90s minor,it is the American teenage girl. She has given a lot of thought to how to approach teenage girls,her peers,in Rookie. Most high-school sophomores dont travel to Paris to attend the couture shows,but Gevinson insists that her tastes are pretty typical. Im our audience, she says.

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The online magazine will consist of monthly themed issues organised around three posts a day as well as two print issues per year. The first post will appear after school,the second at dinnertime and the third when you do your last Facebook check around bed or whatever, Gevinson said.

Gevinson hopes Rookie will resemble Sassy in spirit. Our content respects a kind of intelligence in the readers that right now a lot of writing about teenage girls doesnt, Gevinson said. People think its just going to be another site or magazine that talks about how great celebrities are or how awful celebrities are or dieting, she said. And Im like,Just you wait and see.