Tavi Gevinson was just a misunderstood middle school student from suburban Chicago who started a fashion blog with photos of her exuberantly eccentric outfits. That blog, Style Rookie, won her celebrity friends, invitations to Paris fashion shows, and a lengthy profile in The New Yorker — all by the time she was 14.

See some of Tavi's early style below.

Gevinson graduated from high school this year and she’s showing no signs of slowing down. Now the editor of the online magazine Rookie, she has acted in a few movies and has just made her Broadway debut in This Is Our Youth, a play by Kenneth Lonergan about three kids growing up privileged and confused. Gevinson plays Jessica Goldman, a 19-year-old who frets about how age will change her.

Gevinson finished high school right about the time she began rehearsals. She told Kurt Andersen she felt as if she was in the same boat as her character. “I had a lot of ideas about who I had been and a lot of memories,” she says, “But I had no concept of who I would become.”

Theater was an interest of Gevinson’s as early as grade school, but when she felt rejected by the theater kids, she got into fashion — but not the conventionally pretty kind. Gevinson would throw on flea-market crinoline with a Rodarte dress and her dad’s chunky socks, and use the photos on her blog. Kids in school sometimes made fun of her, she recalls, but she would double down and choose an even more unflattering outfit. “I was thickening my skin, which was probably really good practice for everything I do now,” she says.

In 2011, Gevinson’s one-girl blog morphed into an online teen-girl magazine, Rookie, with personal essays, how-to videos, and interviews with actors and novelists. Gevinson met lots of writers and photographers through her blog, and she sees Rookie as a way to give other talented young women an outlet for their work. “I never wanted to create some kind of binary where you have all these mainstream magazines and we’re alternative,” she says. “I just wanted something that could be nice and honest and normal."

Style Rookie, 2009: Gevinson wears a dress (found at a thrift shop) as a skirt, a top from Old Navy, and her grandmother’s blazer.

Style Rookie, 2010: Gevinson wears a Miu Miu look on loan from the Spring/Summer 2010 collection.