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As a former Sassy reader during my apparently very formative years, I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for Tavi Gevinson and continue to be impressed by the quality of her new Sassy-esque blog, Rookie.
Gevinson’s new venture has pretty much stunned all around, and the content far outstrips that of most-to-all female-centric, fashion-y blogs I’ve seen in all my years following this sort of thing. The girl is a genius, and rightly lauded for her fashion prescience and sharp wit. Which is why it’s kind of douchey that an older, male fashion blogger fairly baselessly attacked her when talking about his own site and its successes.
Seriously, what kind of a dick do you have to be to feel threatened by and publicly call out a 15-year-old girl who has accomplished more in her career than most people two or three times her age? Apparently a super successful one, according to Scott Schuman of the Sartorialist. Schuman found time to brag about his ad rates before he laid into Gevinson, “coyly” disclosing he allegedly makes a quarter to half a million on his own fashion blog. He says:
“My audience is so much larger than everybody else’s that advertisers, well at least American Apparel told me that I am not in their internet budget. My order is so big and they have to pay so much that I am actually in their magazine budget.”
Not very modestly stated, but not too offensive (although rather like getting hit on by a dudebro at a bar) until he criticizes Gevinson… for not having a boyfriend. Schuman attempts to downplay Gevinson’s influence by saying:
“I don’t think her audience is that big. I think her success is a little bit of a conspiracy by established print media that wanted to show that this blog thing is not that important, that it’s done by a bunch of twelve year olds. But a lot of us are serious grown-ups.”
Yes, he’s negging a ninth-grader. He continues:
“I think it’s great that Tavi can create a blog and write for other people that are like-minded — probably other kids around her age — but I don’t know how that is going to help a 26-year old, if she has never had a boyfriend or any of that kind of stuff. She’s just a kid, so she can talk about art and stuff only in an abstract way … to me it is like a five-year old Michael Jackson singing about love.”
Interestingly, Tavi added this post today over at Rookie on bully boys, which was timed quite luckily after Schuman’s shallow critique.
