Tavi Gevinson is the new face of Clinique, and luckily for us, that means a slew of promotional interviews in which the 19-year-old once again dishes out the kind of wisdom that evades most people three times her age. In a recent interview with Fashionista, she did exactly this by revealing her distaste for the anti-aging frenzy:
“I’m more worried about anti-aging than I am about aging. I don’t really want to be someone who — and I know it’s easy to say when you’re younger and older women tell me I’ll feel differently — but I just really don’t want to be someone who’s afraid of aging because you can’t do anything about it unless you die. So you’re fighting a losing battle. It’s not that I’m afraid of being old. I’m afraid of being someone who’s like, ‘Remember when I was young?’ That’s, like, hell to me. I feel like I’ve seen enough cake faces in real life. I have seen [certain celebrities’] faces in the flesh, and it’s not flesh. I’m more scared of becoming that than being like, ‘Hello, yes, I am an older person so I have wrinkles’…
…Meryl Streep seems so obviously graceful and poised. She seems to have aged gracefully. Cate Blanchett? She is not an older woman, but most actresses get an expiration date of very young so in that sense Cate Blanchett is older. Nothing gives me the heebie-jeebies more than someone fighting [aging]. It’s so transparent, it looks bad and it makes me sad. And it’s easy for me to say because I’m 19, but I’m really conscious of that. And also really aware that I’m in a certain industry where that is a thing…”
Will Tavi keep this attitude as she gets older? Will any of us millennials, or will our views on aging drastically change as we, well, age? What her quote makes clear, intentionally or not, is that women are caught in a catch-22: if we resist physical aging with surgery and treatments, we are told we’re sad and desperate; but if we allow aging to happen naturally, we’re often written off by society. I can only hope our options improve as this generation ages.
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I have hang-ups about aging, but they have more to do with my own mortality than my appearance. It seems that so many wonderful things come with age, but the tradeoff is all the time you lose as it happens (obvious, I know, but startling). I wish I could have the wisdom of a 50-something with the physical age of a 20-something so I could have the hard lessons learned from experience already under my belt to make the most of my youth. Of course, having great skin at 50 wouldn’t be too shabby either. A girl can dream, right?
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