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Fashion blogger Jane Aldridge is one of those rare contemporary creatures: an Internet sensation turned mainstream hit. She counts Kanye West among her fans and has designed a line of shoes for Urban Outfitters. She is also a high-school senior.
At 17, though, Texas-based Aldridge is practically a senior citizen compared to some of the online wunderkinds whose opinions on everything from fashion to food are attracting tens of thousands of visitors to their blogs each month.
One of them is David Fishman, a 13-year-old restaurant critic who has written reviews for GQ magazine and Time Out New York Kids. Another is Julia Frakes, who is now 19 but was hired to blog about clothes for Paper magazine two years ago, when she was 17.
Of all the teens and tweens who are blogging their way to fame, however, few have reached the heights of Tavi Gevinson, who began her fashion blog, Style Rookie, in March of 2008 at the ripe old age of 11.
Tavi Gevinson has taken the fashion world by storm with her blog Style Rookie. The 13-year-old counts Rodarte designers Laura and Kate Mulleavy as fans, sits in the front row at fashion shows and has even contributed to Harper’s Bazaar.
Even in today's youth-obsessed culture, the attention being paid to these pint-sized pundits is extraordinary. Why do we care so much about their opinions?
“It's an obvious reflection and end point of a culture that is not particularly complicated, that rarely looks at things with a long-term perspective or tries to get to the root of an issue, that is very much infantile,” says Hal Niedzviecki, a Toronto-based author and cultural critic.
In this kind of atmosphere, Niedzviecki suggests, it should come as no surprise that kids are accepted as authorities on subjects, especially in an online world where whining and bellowing passes for commentary.
“The extent to which we have an infantile culture makes it really rather perfect for teenagers to jump in and fit in,” says Niedzviecki, whose books include 2004's Hello, I'm Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity .
“And what is more infantile than the blogosphere and chat rooms and YouTube?”
Beyond the Web, it's the degree to which mainstream authorities such as magazines and fashion houses are taking kid commentators seriously that signals a shift in media discourse.
Far from being an adorable sideshow, for instance, Gevinson has been called a “blogger with the fashion world at her feet” by the Observer in Britain and receives front-row seats at Marc Jacobs and Rodarte shows.
Her opinion is also sought out by such venerable fashion authorities as Harper's Bazaar, which recently solicited Gevinson's musings on the spring 2010 collections. (A sample review: “... Francisco Costa showed crumpled pastel dresses that looked as if they'd been stained with tears at Calvin Klein.”)
“People want to find the influencers, and that's who these teens are,” says June Cotte, a professor of marketing at the University of Western Ontario's Richard Ivey School of Business.
And as Niedzviecki points out, our idea of expertise has undergone a massive change in the Internet era. Until recently, an expert was someone who had spent a few years undergoing training in a field and then even more time sharpening his or her critical skills. Now, though, wisdom and experience appear to have been supplanted by a thirst for novelty and newness.
To be fair, a few of these underage bloggers do bring a touching enthusiasm to their subject matter, whether it's Gevinson raving about a “ridiculously comfy sweatshirt” from the Gap or Fishman rhapsodizing about a shrimp and lobster dish that left him “wrapped in a lemon-seaweed coma.”
But in ceding critical ground to children, we only make ourselves more childish, experts say.
And when it comes to celebrating teenage style bloggers in particular, we perpetuate the fashion industry's fetishization of youth, says Alison Matthews David, an assistant professor in the school of fashion at Ryerson University in Toronto.
Making celebrities out of 11-year-olds makes one wonder if the industry's cult of youth has any limit, Matthews David adds.
“Fashion has always fetishized youth, but how far can this go?”
