ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 looks at the media output of teen sensation Tavi Gevinson. Tavi first garnered public attention for her fashion blog, Style Rookie. In 2011, when she was nearly fifteen, she then founded Rookiemag, a very popular online magazine for teenage girls. The starting point of the chapter is the observation that Tavi’s writing and imagery are imbued with a very particular kind of nostalgia. The questions it asks are: What is the nature of this temporally blurred, suburban nostalgia? Why has it had such a strong appeal for teenage girls in their cyberspace musings? Is this nostalgia regressive, a sign of cultural inertia, or is there something more hopeful at play? If so, what is the utopian moment and how does it function?
