Day 7: Farewell or is it?

It’s been a week since I started reading Tavi’s blog. Not that she posted much, but her blog turned out to be multidimensional enough to keep me busy for a week.

I learned something: Tavi likes Nesquik, speaks Norwegian, her parents rarely read her blog and famous designers send her clothes to wear and hopefully cover in The Style Rookie. She has fans who comment on her posts that they “love [her] blog,” teachers who somehow adjusted to the way she looks at school and Australian magazine editors who e-mail her with business offers.

She is a teenager with strangely mature eyes and non-hesitant judgments. 

Her language is colloquial, precise and sometimes very brief (think post from 11/8), but this blogger definitely know her audience. They get her! She inspires feedback if not conversation and realizes the power of the online environment (11/13 post).

On day 7 I might still not quite understand why of all fashion blog, and there are plenty, this particular one has become so famous. It must be a combination of Tavi’s personality, fashion insights and age, but mainly, her ability to be so effective online that made her a more prominent blogger. Strangely enough, she has something in common with liberal bloggers from Blog Wars. Tavi doesn’t stay online but is a fashion activist who goes to runway shows (accompanied by her Dad), visits designers and, as of yesterday, starts print magazines.

Although my week of stalking activities is over, The Style Rookie stays on the list of the blogs I follow. Clive Thompson in Brave New World of Digital Intimacy wrote that we develop ambient awareness about the lives of people online. Each of Tavi’s posts taken separately might be only a snapshot of her taste in fashion. However, when taken together, they reveal her personality and make her someone I know and want to “stay in touch” with.

And one more thing:

Thank you, Ms. Tavi Gevinson, for providing me with topics for the last seven days. I’ll stay tuned in.

 

Day 6: Blog and Print. Who is the Boss?

WOW! Am I witnessing a birth of a new fashion “teen-magazine-that-doesn’t-suck”? 

Today Tavi shared exciting news: she and Jane Pratt, founding editor and then EIC of Sassy, are going to start a new magazine. They don’t know what it is going to be yet. They need submissions and ideas for the title. It is not going to be a copy of Sassy, because since the prime of the magazine a lot of things have changed, including “the whole Internet thing.”

I think the Style Rookie is right. Without “the whole Internet thing” this conversation of hers with thousands of people would not be happening now. A fourteen year old fashion guru would not be famous, wouldn’t be contacted by designers and magazine founding editors and definitely wouldn’t be able to recruit people to write for partially her publication. 

Isn’t it ironic that a print medium should be born online? However, this convergence of the media is not surprising anymore. All major publications are online now; they get promoted on Twitter and Facebook, are read on iPhones and iPads and commented on via Blackberries. I bet the Sassy-inspired publication will start as online project and then possibly go to print. 

From the organizational standpoint, it couldn’t be more convenient. As the Style Rookie herself says, they can have writers of all ages from all countries where the authors have access to their emails.

“A great advantage to creating a magazine today is the access to talent and voice. This is supposed to have a "for the people, by the people" kinda vibe.”

Surprisingly, I got excited about it. As much as I don’t care about the teen fashion, I now want to see this magazine.

[Added on 11/14/2010]
Apparently, this has become news.

Day 5: Comments?

As one of the most popular fashion blogs, The Style Rookie gets plenty of fashion-obsessed and just young-blogger-curious visitors a day (as mentioned earlier, about 54,000 a day). The majority of those are just passing by, and no one will ever know what they thought about Tavi’s blog. However, some of them leave comments, and that’s what I am looking at today.

Based on my own blogging experience, people usually comment more if a post includes a question or a controversial statement. For example, it’s no surprise that Daily Kos gets 166 comments on his latest (as of right now) blog post. Followers comment on the post, comment on other comments and thus sparkle discussions which don’t necessarily stay within the topic of the original post.

The Style Rookie, on the contrary, doesn’t pose obvious questions. The blog merely gives direction to the thought flow. However, each post has about a 100 comments. 103 people commented on Sleepy and Hollow. 3 major observations:

1.       Tavi doesn’t answer her readers. At least in the comment threads. There is no discussion going on between the commentators as well.

This was a little disappointing. I am used to bloggers actively participating in the “afterlife” of their posts. One of my favorite bloggers, Anna Rusakova, posts her creative work from time to time. She takes the time to answer every comment which sometimes results in long threads. However, there is no rule set in stone and each blog probably creates its own comment-response culture. Is there a blog ethics rule about that?

2.       Posting comments is a good way to promote your own blog.

People who post comments often include links to their blogs as well. Tavi’s take on it:

“The best way to get your blog out there is to comment when you see something you like on another blog. Interaction and communication, the wonders of the Internet, next to pointless videos of animals sniffing each others butts and illegal music downloads”.   

So I guess Tavi’s readers want to promote their own fashion related content. She also gets invited to sometimes related and sometimes random projects and research.

3.       The Style Rookie followers know what she is talking about.This made me a little self-conscious by confirming my absolute cultural/fashion ignorance. A good thing, however, is that Tavi knows her audience.

Day 4: To be consumed regularly.

Yes, I am irritated. You, who blog at least every other day and, actually, every day in the last week, all of a sudden stop posting? You have nothing to tell me for the entire 3 days?

Wait a minute, why is this frustrating? Isn’t the blog (or at least this particular blog) a personal journal on the Web? If the answer is “yes”, it would mean that a blogger should be free to post any time he or she wants to. It would mean that I am just given a chance to follow their life and thoughts and have to be grateful that they exist at all.

However, if I answer that a blog isn’t just a personal journal, it becomes a whole different issue. It then appears more like a paper or a magazine you subscribe to. Depending on the publication, you can expect to receive your copy daily, weekly or monthly, but you certainly want to know when. So if I perceive catching up on blog as my morning newspaper

and The Style Rookie as my daily fashion advisory, I can’t blame myself for being frustrated with silence.

Although blogs are nothing like structured and linear McLuhan’s print media, the readers still need blogs to follow certain patterns, maybe even more so as the blogosphere grows and matures. Probably, like Wikipedia or spoilers communities in Jenkins' Convergence Culture, the bloggers will have to develop and follow a set of more structured rules if they want to gain loyal readership and credibility.

So what started as a personal journal might have transformed over time into another responsibility, because there is the waiting audience to take into account.

Dear bloggers, to avoid frustration please post regularly.

Day 3: What do you see?

Imagine that you are a naïve reader who just stumbles upon the Style Rookie blog as I have once. You know nothing about fashion besides what people wear on the T. If you are not from the U.S., you also don’t know much about old movies, children’s books and other American culture things. With that in mind, try reading Tavi’s blog.

Start with the last post titled Sleepy and Hollow. Here you have five images.

1.       A girl I have never seen in my life with a caption which should probably mean something. 

2.       A doll with suspiciously red eyes and presumably a fashionable outfit. 

3.       A random (?) boy next to a fake Christmas tree.  

4.       Here I might guess something. It might be an ad or a magazine cover judging by the unfamiliar Italian looking word and model’s black lipstick.

5.       This one I know. Chloe Sevigny. A model, right?

Um… How does this all come together and is it really supposed to mean something? Apparently it does make sense to a significant amount of people, judging by 85 somewhat informed comments inspired by the post.

The good news is that the blogger must have anticipated potential confusion. The very bottom of the post has 5 words which seem to be the captions to the pictures. From them I found out:

1.       The girl is Maureen McCormick, a character in the 1970s show The Brady Bunch called Marcia Brady. Marcia became a fashion designer.

2.       This is not just a creepy doll. This is Blythe, a fashion doll from the 1970s. In 2001 it was recreated by a Japanese company. Now the Blythe enthusiasts make fashion collections for them.

3.       As I thought, a random boy. The picture comes from Flickr and is titled “Christmas, 1969.”

4.       Missoni is a fashion house based in Varese, Italy (good guess). And the peak of its popularity was in the 1970.

5.       Chloe. Model, actress and a fashion designer, born in the 1970.

So, now I get it. The post is about fashion in the 1970s. Who would have known?

Marshall McLuhan could put this in “Understanding Media.” Blog environment is not linear or one-dimensional. It lets the reader explore and wander away from the author’s page. It gives him or her full control of the process of information gathering. One could glance over the post, while the other could dive into its depth, follow links to someone’s Tumblr or Flickr, or get lost in Wikipedia trying to make sense of the message. There is also an option to start a discussion in the comments to make it even more interactive, not only with the medium itself but with other users. How "cool" is that?

The ability of a blog platform to link things allowed the whole new type of writing - very short and extremely customizable. The medium indeed became the message.  

Nothing like the printed page, is it? 

Day 2: What or Who is It All About?

Why do people blog? Is it because each of us possesses this one unique piece of information everyone else has to know? Does each blogger have a higher goal he or she wants to accomplish? A fascinating personality maybe? As appealing as it sounds, it might not be true. There is a chance, that people blog out of the selfish desire to be noticed and known.
Lakshmi Chaudri must have gotten it right: we live in the era of micro-celebrity. If every other kid under 12 believes that becoming famous is a part of the American Dream, I can only imagine how this percentage changes as they grow older.
Tavi’s blog could perfectly illustrate the statement above. She was, in fact, under 12 when she started it. It plays into the celebrity aspect as well. Although the Style Rookie’s opening “mission statement” goes as follows:

“Well I am new here.... [Notice that it is in bold. The impatient readers have been waiting, haven’t we?] Lately I've been really interested in fashion, and I like to make binders and slideshows of "high-fashion" modeling and designs,”

It is not just fashion she blogs about but rather Tavi+fashion, exactly in this order. Her blog is nothing like the Sartoralist or WSJ fashion blogs where we don’t see the blogger. Here, in the last 10 posts we get 15 images of Tavi vs. 16 images of fashion or somewhat related shots. She posts the links to many articles, slideshows, magazine publications and videos that feature her (and there are plenty).
So what is the Style Rookie about, fashion or Tavi Gevinson? I guess, Tavi has already said “fashion”, while my take on it is her. Is it a bad thing? In no way. I think it is normal. It is a representation of the now common desire to be famous.
Some people are just better at making it happen.

Day 1

The Style Rookie: An Overview.

Her blog gets about 54,000 views daily.

She has a publicist.

She chose not to appear on Oprah and the Tonight Show because “that’s just not a crowd whose eyes she wants on her.”

She’s had her blog for 3 years.

And she is 14 years old.

Tavi Gevinson from Chicago is a high school freshman and the author of the popular blog The Style Rookie.

Tavi is a fashion blogger. Her weblog is a compilation of runway photographs borrowed from style.com (as mentioned in her blog), her own Canon Powershot A590IS pictures and shots of Tavi herself taken by her friends. Tavi includes a lot of images of models, outfits, and anything that she finds related to the style or trend she wants to cover on a certain day. There is some copy in each post, just enough to make sense of the where her thoughts are going.

However, posts are only a part of her blog. The Style Rookie has and is linked to plenty of other content. First of all, Tavi shares her photographs on Flickr, 8tracks, Polyvore, Twitter, Weardrobe and emphasizes that she is not on Facebook.

 She has an online clothing mini-store. A T-shirt with the visible “tavi” logo, on the right of the blog posts, was designed by her in collaboration with Borders&Frontiers.  For those who might not get it, the fashion guru explains that the T-shirt was inspired by Yves Saint Laurent Fall 2008 when Tavi was already on the fashion watch.

Tavi has two different e-mails, one of them specifically designated “for press inquiries.” She also clarifies that she cannot help with school projects at the time.

The Style Rooky provides links to her other Pop blog, which at first glance has more pictures of unbelievable outfits and less images of the author, to the list of her “Complete love” blogs and “Favourite Tumblrs.” 

I am going to follow the fashion expert for the next week and hopefully understand why and how Tavi Gevinson has become so famous in the blogosphere and the fashion world.