Report by Isaac Lock

Arrrrrrghhhhhhh! Child bloggers everywhere! You’re probably already sick of hearing about Tavi, the strangely charming 13-year-old American blogger who has managed to turn herself into an internet celebrity in recent months with her unnervingly knowing references to fashion moments, cultural events and, most bizarrely of all, typeface trends that happened long before her time. If you haven’t read her blog you will at least have heard the endless speculation about her since she caused ripples by plonking herself on the front row at the New York shows last week. People haven’t stopped talking: is she a JT LeRoy-style hoax, masterminded by a major photographer/an adult with freakishly good skin and miniature features/made entirely of plasticine/preserved by Eerie, Indiana-style human Tupperware/a hologram/meant to be in school or something? The truth, boringly enough, is that she is just a scarily intelligent kid, who has a baffling degree of visual literacy, thanks to having grown up with the internet as a resource. She is actually just the thin end of the wedge of kiddy-blogging.
Anyway, this week two precocious, feisty, international schoolkids (a boy called Lev with long ginger hair like a young Mick Hucknall, and a girl called Noa who talks to her friends on the phone like an Editor in Chief talks to their PA) have been turning heads at the shows by stomping around like mini-editors, shooting street-style pictures like mini Sartorialists, and getting their press passes confiscated by security for being underage. If you go onto their blog, brainsbeauty.wordpress.com, you can link to hundreds of other fashion blogs by youths, all
equally outspoken and obsessive. Noa reckons she doesn’t even know who Tavi is because “there are a lot of kids doing fashion blogs out there – too many to really keep track of.”
However, even though they’re only just starting to get attention, the days of the mini-blogger are numbered. Once you get over the novelty, there’s actually nothing all that interesting in the innermost thoughts of a kid who’s discovering fashion for the first time. The qualified opinion of a life-long expert is more relevant.
People read the kids because they’re currently running the internet while the grown-ups are scrabbling around in a mad panic to keep up. However, as has become apparent this season in the way everyone
and their assistant is frantically
multitasking like mad to try to get on the online bandwagon, they’re getting there. The girls at Vogue
are posting five blogs a day each, national newspaper writers are stomping around with digital SLRs for instant blog posts, and Grazia’s Paula Reed is covering the magazine, the daily blog and trying to film herself with a Flip video camera to post online films.
Her colleague Kay Barron, meanwhile, claims that “about eight of us are Twittering for Grazia all at once, all the time. It’s a frenzy, but everyone is suddenly taking the internet.” Even Colin McDowell has just launched colinmcdowell.com, exploiting the relative freedom of the internet to, he claims, “write down my nastiest thoughts, send them off and get them online.” If even the real grown-ups are finally getting on board, does this mean that the internet age everyone has been guffing on about for 10 years or so is finally upon us?
Here’s hoping. Internet 3.0 should be quality content by relevant commentators! So enjoy it while you can, amazing/terrifying mini- bloggers; the real world is on its way!

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