NY mag might have been "ragging" on Tavi - but it scooped the NY Times

the photo that launched tavi into orbit: fashion robot

Tavi update! In my nightly net trawls I spotted a comment on NY mag’s The Cut blog overnight from someone claiming not only to be Tavi’s sister, but that Tavi had recently been interviewed for the "New York Times Style" magazine. Coupla hours later comes this update.


According to a new post on The Cut:

“A source at the mag confirmed that Tavi will indeed be in the August 17 women's fashion issue, though they weren't entirely positive if the writer met her in person or talked via e-mail. (But since there are photos on Tavi's blog of her at the Times building, we're guessing in person.)”

Tavi’s blog Style Rookie does feature shots of her at the “NYTimes building” but I must admit, I was still coming to terms with the prospect of a 12 year-old style goddess when I first looked at Style Rookie, that I didn't pay much attention to the fine print.

Her July 19 post:


style rookie

The woman in the photo with Tavi is “Elizabeth” from the White Lightning blog who I quoted yesterday.

You know, the one who had noted:

“let me say this, nymag and all random haters take note: miss tavi, the style rookie, is real. and basically awesomer than most of us. we had lunch. she got to see what a magazine office is like. we discussed the cdg/lv bags. someone in the elevator thought she was MY DAUGHTER (yeah, that has neverrr happened to me before. especially since i still get carded at rated R movies. but i would adopt her in a sec so WHATEVS.). as soon she's old enough i'd welcome her to be the star intern in our office. and then she'll steal all of our jobs”.

This is one and the same Elizabeth Spiridakis who works for The New York Times it now emerges. Spiridakis writes a weekly blog on nytimes.com (to which she occasionally makes reference on White Lightning).

I can find no reference to Tavi or Style Rookie on nytimes.com. Perhaps they thought the story would hold until August 17.

It must be especially frustrating for the NYT given that not only was it onto the Tavi story before the NY mag, a number of bloggers who have been railing against NY mag's so-called "ragging" on Tavi appear to have confused the two mastheads. A case in point this blog headline, "New York Times = Bully".

By "Style" magazine one assumes Tavi's sister meant "T" - whose August 17 issue does indeed, as the "source" mentioned, focus on women's fashion.

No idea what the magazine’s lead time is but now that Tavi has graduated to the status of “coolest kid ever” – a gong she will have to share with that Sartorialist kid until she can trump his Pierre Hardy sneakers – stand by to see if the original August 17 T cover subject gets dumped for Tavi.

Meanwhile The Cut wasn’t taking any chances with its tone yesterday.

In the event that anything was to be further misconstrued by "Team Tavi", the blog signed off its Tavi update with the following words:

“To which we say, Huzzah, Tavi! At 12 we were still watching Fashion Television on cable and dreaming of NYC. That's a compliment, by the way”.