Tavi and Alexa

Tavi Gevinson

Alexa Chung

Lately, I've been watching youtube videos of Tavi and Alexa...Who?

Tavi Gevinson started writing a fashion blog when she was eleven years old, called Style Rookie. Now she's eighteen, and the founder and editor-in-chief of the online Rookie Magazine, aimed primarily at teenage girls. She considers herself to be a feminist. She recently moved to New York City to go to NYU, and is costarring in a Broadway play called This Is Our Youth. One day, she plans to write screenplays.

Alexa Chung is an English televison presenter, model and contributing editor at British Vogue. She is a muse to many fashion designers because of her distinctive personal style. She frequently appears on best-dressed lists, is a regular model for Vogue, Elle and Harper's Bazaar, and is often seen in the front row at fashion shows. She is thirty years old.

Why, you're probably wondering, do I care about a teenage fashion blogger, and a thirty year old style muse? Well, because they're interesting, and intelligent. They're discovering who they are. They are experimenting with style; trying on new personas; inquisitive about life. And they aren't bogged down by rules. For them, style is fun and expressive and ever-changing. They're not concerned yet with what they can't do. They aren't hiding behind makeup; they're using it to express, accentuate, and play. And they're soaking up life and art and literature and pop culture and whatever else catches their attention, like sponges.

Watching Tavi's TED talk, Still Figuring It Out is so inspiring to me, because even though her target audience is teenage girls, I relate to what she is saying; because honestly, I'm still trying to figure it all out myself. Of course, we all know that I never will, because change is the only constant in life, and figuring IT out is an ongoing, never ending, process. 

The thing is, everyone expects young people to be curious, bold, experimental, fearless, and a little bit hit or miss. You kind of anticipate the occasional, naive lack of sensibility. But after about forty, people expect you to have your shit together. My question is, do we ever really have our shit together? Or do we just pretend? Do we delude ourselves into thinking we can have it all? Or do we eventually give up, decide it's time to put away the toys, symbolically speaking, and become grown ups?

Well, of course, a certain amount of maturity/responsibility is required to be an adult. But must we relinquish the inquisitive nature of our youth? Does "the unknown" have to lose it's exhilaration and just become dreaded and scary? Must we squelch our unbridled sense of adventure? At what point is one expected to take a reality check, and watch their dreams and aspirations fade in the rear view mirror?

C