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An Online Legacy: Rookie Mag Turns Ten

A decade after the launch of Rookie Mag, Tavi Gevinson’s cult online
zine, a handful of writers and readers speak to its lasting impact on
culture today.
October 7, 2021

COMMENTS: ROOKIE MAG. ART TREATMENT BY LIZ COULBOURN

When style blogger wunderkind Tavi Gevinson launched Rookie Mag

in September 2011, in-the-know teens rushed home from school to
devour posts about everything from DIY flower crowns to learning
how to b*tchface. Back then, the website was updated three times a
day: after school, at dinner time, and “when it’s really late and you
should be writing a paper but are Facebook stalking instead.” Chatty
and informative, Rookie felt like a big sister and a best friend rolled
into one, crafting a quintessentially teen visual daydream filled with
glitter, stickers, journal doodles and vintage-style record players — but
the aesthetics only tell half the story.

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Over the next seven years, Rookie became a refuge for teens who felt
alienated in their suburban hometowns and by high school cliques. It
was made for teenagers who hated being teenagers, but through the
romantic haze of a Petra Collins photo series or a peek into the
confessional pages of another teen’s journals, being a teen suddenly
seemed aspirational rather than an awkward phase spent waiting for
real life to begin. The online zine folded in 2018, but the archive
remains online for old fans to revisit and new readers to discover —
and the site still averages 220K views per month.

Rookie approached topics from politics and mental health to sex and
drugs through an intimate, educational lens for teens, with most of its
content created by teens. Essentially grown out of Tavi’s bedroom, a
progression from her diary-like fashion blog Style Rookie, Rookie was
inspired by riot grrrl-era fanzines and 90s teen magazine Sassy.

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Writer Stephanie Kuehnert had been in high school in the ‘90s and
always dreamed of making a zine with her friends. When she heard
what Tavi was doing, she reached out. Kuehnert went on to write for
Rookie from its launch up until its final month in November 2018. “We
had a Facebook group for staff and it was like a big slumber party,”
she recalls. “I remember the day it launched, I was at a wedding and I
sat in the bathroom of the motel refreshing the website and waiting
for it to go live.”
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With no official office space and many of its contributors still in high
school, the Rookie staff interacted digitally via email or Facebook
groups, occasionally meeting up for events like Rookie Prom or the
Rookie Road Trip. “The Rookie Prom was one of the best parties I’ve
ever been to,” says writer Arabelle Sicardi, another member of the
original Rookie staff. “It was a basement party at a hotel in New York.
We did readings [from the site] and everyone was dancing. When all
the staff met up in person for the first time it was like a family reunion,
but when you grow up on the internet, meeting a person is not a
definitive aspect of your relationship.”

Rookie played a part in forming countless online friendships, whether

they were made in the website’s active comments section or through
meetups organized by readers in cities around the world. While the
digital nature of Rookie was the reason it could exist on the scale it
did, the zine fostered an appreciation for analogue culture, too.
Readers in the comments would often search for pen pals to
exchange paper zines and care packages with.

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Reader Mona Cordes grew up in Germany, where she heard about

Rookie when she was 15. “I had pen pals through reading Rookie and
when I moved to London, I met a couple of friends in real life who I
linked with through Rookie,” she says. “I didn’t fit in in my small town
but Rookie made some of my feelings and adventures by myself feel
valid.”
In many ways Rookie was a harbinger for the main character energy
that has taken over TikTok today. It encouraged readers to go out and
do things on their own, to aestheticize their lives. Going for a
milkshake after school or sitting at the skate park was transformed
from a mundane suburban pastime to an integral part of the teen
experience. The goal seemed to be to live in the moment, but the
moment also needed to be digitally digestible on Blogspot or
Instagram. “Rookie was the angsty pastoral landscape I escaped to
every day after school,” says former Rookie reader Sam Cummins,
who co-hosts fashion and culture podcast Nymphet Alumni. “As
teenagers themselves, the writers understood my youthful turbulence
better than anyone. I felt that they taught me how to dominate the
suburban humdrum of my life.”

The Legacy of Rookie Mag Ten Years Later

Rookie understood that being a teenager could be lonely and painful,

but provided a toolkit of books, films, and music to nourish our
obsessions and make us feel less alone. Rookie’s aesthetic
showcased a yearning for past eras, particularly the ‘60s and the ‘90s.
A lot of what Rookie created wasn’t necessarily new, but by
introducing it to a new generation in original ways, Rookie’s nostalgia
served as an ode to the past rather than its rip-off. 

When Olivia Rodrigo borrowed from Hole’s Live Through This cover art
to promote SOUR Prom, Courtney Love accused her of plagiarism —
but for Rookie fans, Olivia Rodrigo and Courtney Love were already
part of the same visual world. This is largely thanks to Olivia’s ongoing
collaboration with Rookie photographer Petra Collins, one of the
leading creatives still propelling Rookie’s girlhood aesthetic into the
mainstream. (Both Collins and Gevinson declined to comment for this
story.) From the stickers on her face on the cover of SOUR to the
cheerleader outfit in the “brutal” music video, Olivia could have
stepped straight out of a Rookie photo series.

“The people that have created the Rookie ecosystem are also creating
culture,” adds Sicardi. “That's how it's living on. Olivia Rodrigo, the
number one pop star in the world, owes her aesthetic to Petra Collins
and the Rookie ecosystem. Pop culture is Rookie. It's all still there. It
just doesn't need to be on that particular website anymore. We've
grown out of that particular space.”

Collins is just one of the creatives continuing the legacy of Rookie.

Photographer Alice Liu is currently working on a film about Asian
American girlhood in the suburbs inspired by the years she spent
reading and contributing to Rookie as a teenage girl in suburban
Toronto. “I loved the film aesthetic of the photos on Rookie so I asked
my parents for their old point and shoot and started shooting on film,”
Liu says. “I grew up in a predominantly Asian American community
that wasn’t very art focused so Rookie really kick started my interest
and career in photography.”

For writer Ogechi Egonu, Rookie was what gave her the confidence to
pursue writing professionally. In middle school, when Egonu had a
style blog with her twin sister, the two of them would rush home to
read Rookie every day. A few weeks after attending a Rookie event,
Egonu received a DM from one of the editors asking if she would like
to contribute some writing on the Black teen experience. “I was a fan
of Rookie before I became a writer for Rookie and I was still a fan
when I was writing for them,” she says. “My first piece was about how
lipstick helped me love my lips. Growing up I’d been bullied about
them a lot because they’re really big, so I wrote about that along with
a lipstick how-to.” Egonu continued writing for Rookie up until its fold,
contributing DIY fashion and makeup guides, self-care and thrifting
tips, and writing for Rookie’s Black hair column.
 The Legacy of Rookie Mag Ten Years Later

Rookie received some criticism in its early days for how heavily it
focused on the white, slender, American teen experience, with readers
speaking up in the comments section about the lack of representation
for other ethnicities and body types. But over the years, it diversified
its content and contributors — one benefit of the zine existing digitally
was that it could welcome creatives from all around the world. South
African writer Lebohang Masango saw Rookie as a chance to learn
about another culture while sharing her own. 

“It was a really great opportunity to bring in some of my culture and

heritage and what we were thinking about as young people in South
Africa,” Masango says. “I wouldn’t say there is a universal teen
experience but when thinking about our personal lives, our anxieties,
relationships, friendships, insecurities there were definitely similarities
between teens in South Africa and teens over in the U.S.”

In 2013, Petra Collins gifted Tavi a book titled “Nothing Lasts Forever,”
which contained photos of them growing up together. In her
December editor’s letter from that year, Tavi describes “forever” as
“the state, exclusive to those between the ages of 13 and 17, in which
one feels both eternally invincible and permanently trapped.” Rookie
fostered a great awareness of the passing of time. It encouraged
fevered documentation of every moment whether in journals or
collages or film photographs. However, documenting it all will never
stop time from passing.

Our teenage years don’t last forever, and Rookie Mag didn’t either. But
like a memory of a first drive or a first kiss, Rookie lingers on. It’s still
there, in the art and friendships it helped bring into existence, and the
importance it put on being a teenage girl.