Tavi Gevinson Is a Publisher, Actress and Style Icon -- And a Teenager: The Code/Media Interview

Media executives know that teenagers don’t use media the way teenagers used to use media. This drives them nuts, and has them scrambling to figure out What Teenagers Want, so they can figure out how to reach them and sell them things.

So here’s one way to get to that: Ask a teenager.

That’s kind of what we did at Code/Media in February, when we brought Tavi Gevinson onstage for an interview. Gevinson isn’t your average teenager — unless you know other teenagers who became style icons in middle school, run their own influential magazine and have starred on Broadway.

But she is a teenager, and she’s still very much trying to figure out what she’s interested in and what she wants to do with herself. And she’s very happy to discuss that, in a way that’s both roundabout and very particular.

We had a lot of interesting people onstage last month, and my educated hunch is that many people in our audience had never heard of Gevinson before we chatted. Afterward, many people told us she was one of the highlights of the show. See what you think, and make sure to get to the end of the chat, where she opened up a bit more in response to questions from the audience:

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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