If you haven’t heard, there is currently a huge kerfluffle going on about a Friend of Teeny Manolo, Tavi Gevinson. My esteemed colleague raincoaster wrote about Tavi’s fantastic blog long before Tavi was sitting in the front row of couture shows in New York and Paris. And writing for Harper’s Bazaar, and being on the covers of magazines and being BFF’s with the women behind Rodarte.

Which, by the way,  has apparently gotten some fashion insiders quite annoyed.

And hey, I suppose that is their right to get annoyed at things.  I get annoyed all the time, I totally understand.

However, instead of taking the, ahem, adult high road and demurring politely when asked about the thirteen year old blogger, they are instead swinging for the bleachers.

Perhaps they are thinking that if Tavi wants to “play in the big leagues” she should be ready to take some criticism, and to some degree, that is true.  But they also need to take into account that no matter how mature she seems, she is still a thirteen year old.  And they are grown women. There is a difference between being candid and just being cruel, and it seems they have no problems being rather harsh about a teenager whom they see as their rival. 

One even had the temerity to criticiz Tavi’s father:

Why wasn’t Tavi at school?

At the Dior show, trying to fight my way backstage to get a quote from John Galliano, I nearly fell over a tiny, grey-haired woman who, from the back, I took to be a septuagenarian Japanese fashion fanatic, as she was dressed head-to-toe in Comme des Garçons. When she was ushered into the inner sanctum before me, and turned around, I saw, with a sick lurch, that it was actually Tavi Gevinson, the 14-year-old fashion blogger from Chicago. She was being shadowed by her father, an English teacher, and has recently dyed her hair the trendiest colour.

As a mother of a 14-year-old, my first thought was,“Hang on, isn’t it term-time in America, too?”. Had I not been so busy trying to attract Galliano’s attention, I would have asked Mr Gevinson why he thought it was right to take his daughter out of school to go to haute couture shows, where she would be treated like a celebrity by paparazzi? Or why he thought it OK for her to model for Pop and Love magazines last year?…

…It’s all happening too fast for Tavi, and I wonder if her father knows how to protect her from it. I hope she’s got her nose to the grindstone, catching up with missed lessons this week, but it’s hard to imagine a kid being able to come back down to reality after that.

I’m sorry, but there are some things that are possibly once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, and traveling to France to meet John Galliano would seem to qualify as one of them.  I would have no issues  taking my own son out for something even less exciting than that.  The quote above speaks as sour grapes masquerading as “motherly” concern to me. 

I think that Tavi is a wonderful writer, and her appeal to both the general public and the fashion world is undeniable.  Perhaps she may not always have the spotlight shining on her as brightly as it does at this moment.  Perhaps she will lose interest in the fasion world and its denizens and move her considerable talents on to something else.

But, she’ll always have Paris.