Tavi Gevinson, the 14-year-old fashion blogger wunderkind — and subject of various Fashion Week profiles, including one in the New Yorker — is launching a magazine.
Jane Pratt, the former editor of Sassy and Jane magazines, apparently got in touch with Gevinson, and the pair are planning to start “a magazine for an audience of wallflowerly teenage girls,” Gevinson announced on her blog over the weekend.
In a post on her Style Rookie blog entitled “it’s happening,” Gevinson explained the idea:
You guys may know how I feel about Sassy. You also may know that I've been babbling about how I think our generation should get one, too. Jane Pratt, founding editor and then EIC of Sassy, also became aware, and emailed me, and we've met a couple times, and it looks like we're going to start a magazine for an audience of wallflowerly teenage girls.
Of course, it won't be Sassy (or the rebirth of Sassy, or Sassy 2.0) and nor do we want it to be. For one, you can't try to recreate something that good. For another, while I can read old issues of Sassy and relate, the world has changed a bit in the past 15 or so years, and that whole Internet thing happened, and this world calls for something different. Something that will use Sassy as a point of reference for the whole teen-magazine-that-doesn't-suck thing, and something in which Jane Pratt will take part, but something that is not trying to recreate the other something a bunch of us love and don't want to see copied.
The post also called for contributors to what Gevinson admitted was a “vague” concept.
For Gevinson, a widely-read blogger, it’s an entry into the print magazine world. For Pratt, it’s a return. After serving as Sassy’s editor, Pratt launched Jane in 1997, and then exited the magazine in 2005 to follow her “wanderlust” — which led to a satellite radio show. (At one point in her post-Jane life, a rumor surfaced that Pratt was developing a print magazine with Gwen Stefani.)
Pratt was replaced by ElleGirl founding editor Brandon Holley, and the magazine folded two years later.
Nonetheless, Gevinson wrote, “I have a really good feeling about this.”
