Tavi Gevinson Paid Tribute To Rei Kawakubo In Her Bat Mitzvah Speech
By the time Tavi Gevinson was 13 years old, she’d already become the patron saint of fashion bloggers. As the founder of Style Rookie, Gevinson was featured in The New York Times, had her Fashion Week diary published in Harper’s Bazaar, and served as a model/muse for Rodarte's clothing collaboration with Target. So when the time came for her bat mitzvah, it was only natural that she blogged about it for her nearly 30,000 daily readers. “Something else that was taking up a lot of time in preparation finally took place — my bat mitzvah. It was a great experience and pretty amazing celebrating with all these people I only see on occasion and separately, all at the same place,” Gevinson wrote at the time, along with sharing an excerpt from her bat mitzvah speech, which honored Comme des Garçons founder Rei Kawakubo. “I'M GETTING OLD, KIDS. I DID JUST CHANT THE TORAH, AFTER ALL!”
Gevinson went on to retire Style Rookie only two years later, instead focusing her efforts on launching the now-defunct Rookie: an online teen magazine with a milieu steeped in the gauzy crosshairs of pop culture, fashion, and social issues. But while Gevinson has long been a purveyor of the adolescent experience, teendom was a particularly trying time for the writer. “I definitely got made fun of for my outfits but there were also people who would say, ‘I look forward to what you’re wearing every day,’” she explains. At an age often defined by your ability to conform to the status quo, not everybody was so appreciative of Gevinson’s avant-garde sensibilities. “Whenever someone seemed to have an inkling that my hobby was being recognized by grown-ups I would feel very embarrassed. If someone said, ‘Oh my mom saw you in something,’ I would sort of make the interaction end as quickly as possible. It was hard to reconcile these different parts of myself.”
Now 24, Gevinson is finally revisiting Rookie — in the form of a new podcast, modeled after the magazine’s popular “Life Skills” column — while also starring in the upcoming reboot of Gossip Girl. And though she’s at peace with the unorthodox path that’s led her to this moment, she still has one piece of advice she wishes she could share with her extremely online 13-year-old self. “I would [tell her] to draw on her support system more to bridge the gap between the virtual friends and the IRL friends. And to not look at the internet so privately and in so much despair,” she says. Below, Gevinson meditates on her bat mitzvah — Loehmann’s party dress included.
On her bat mitzvah theme mixup:
The party was at the temple in the room just next to the sanctuary. It was where on high holidays they would open up a divider between the two rooms for extra seating. It had a navy carpet with flecks of gold and a stage where I performed in Camp Shalom’s production of Little Women as Laurie.
I didn't have a theme but for a long time I thought a bar mitzvah theme referred to your torah portion. So at school Hannah Goodbar asked me what my theme was going to be and I said, '“Ummm ritual sacrifice with blood, goats, and people running around naked?” I think she politely cringed and was sort of like, “That sounds great.”
On buying her dress for the festivities at Loehmann’s:
The central conflict of my bat mitzvah was me being like, “How seriously should I take this?” I wanted to wear something cool but when I learned that we were going to Loehmann's to get my dress I sort of resigned myself to being like, “It’s fine because none of this really matters.”
Then when we were there I found this dress that I was shocked to like so much. It had these laser cut patterns that made it look like a paper snowflake and some kind of baubles on top that I removed. I wore it with a necklace I got at Urban Outfitters that was the result of some free gift card, and a piece of fabric in my hair that was from a small New York label called Obesity and Speed that sent me a lot of t-shirts. Oh and the shoes were a freebie from a New York label called Slow and Steady Wins The Race, which is still around.
On her “money booth” party activity:
I had a booth that people could go in and inside it blew money around. [The goal was to] try to catch the money and some of it was fake and some of it was real. The Anti-Defamation League is surely going to contact my family after this but that was the game we had. I don’t remember where the idea came from. I feel like it came with the DJ? I can’t imagine my parents of their own volition being like, “We’ve gotta get the kid a money booth!” It truly was bad for the Jews.
On curating a very specific soundtrack:
I remember giving the DJ a playlist because I didn’t want people to be dancing. I didn’t want my bat mitzvah to become a bacchanalian late afternoon of grinding and snowballing because when I went to other bar and bat mitzvahs I was afraid of those things. So I got all of the music I liked from other blogs. It was probably a mix of whatever indie music was popular in 2009 and some Bob Dylan that I liked.
On her early encounters with dating:
I had an on-and-off-again something with this one boy that was very confusing, but I remember earlier in sixth grade asking Brian Mooney for his phone number and him saying “123456789.” I slowly gathered that I wasn’t going to excel [with boys] by [traditional] standards so I had to create my own. But the matrix of criteria [I created] for myself could be equally toxic in other ways.
I also remember one kid, Timmy, who had his locker next to mine being like, “Your dress looks like a curtain!” He seemed very genuinely upset. At the time I was very conscious of the gender piece of it. How when I looked at basic magazines they were telling me to dress to appeal to the Timmy’s of the world but when I looked at cool, real fashion magazines that covered innovative designers, it wasn’t about that at all. It was about striving for something greater and more interesting and holy. I don’t think I was fully aware that [dressing like that] was my armor because I was insecure about being a late bloomer — or not ready to see myself as a sexual being — and I didn’t like that people around me were starting to “date,” but I was at least aware of feeling that I didn’t want to care about being pretty.
On her mother’s haunting choice of invitation font:
My mom took me to Paper Source and let me pick out two kinds of paper, a stamp, and an ink pad. I believe it was a pastel, pink, blue, silver situation, and the stamp was of a button. Then she made them and she used Papyrus for the font. I remember when I posted it on my blog some girl who regularly commented on mine and I regularly commented on hers was like, “Papyrus? Really?” And I knew it wasn’t cool but my mom had done it so I was like, “Fuck you!” I didn’t say that but I was like, “You’re going to criticize my mom’s choice of font for my handmade bat mitzvah invitations? Like are you a monster?”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I always told my daughter that being the weird kid in school wasn't so bad. Look how she turned up. I loved the moneybox story -it was hysterical.