Jane Pratt

Jane Pratt, xoJane's Editor-in-Chief (and of course the founding editor of Sassy and Jane) has launched xoVain, a new site devoted exclusively to beauty. Tagline: “No beauty secrets." We got the scoop on the new site--plus Cat Marnell's imminent return to xoJane!

Courtney Love is allegedly getting booted from her West Village townhouse for missing her rent and "ruining" the designer decor by giving it a paint

Once "The 13-Year-Old Fashion Blogger," Tavi Gevinson is now officially The 15-Year-Old Editor. Her site for teenage girls, Rookie, is up and running as of yesterday and we're impressed. Although it's been a while, I'm pretty sure that if I were a teenager I would think Rookie was the coolest thing ever. The content and design are cute but not cloying, honest but not too earnest. The site is straight-forward and clever without feeling negative or sarcastic. Lady Gaga called Tavi "the future of journalism" before even seeing Rookie. There's already talk of it fitting in amongst other "lady sites" like Jezebel, The Hairpin, Hello Giggles and Jane Pratt's XOJane. Of course, none of those sites have super cute back-to-school fashion editorials like this one (seriously--it's good). It does have a feminist angle--not in an in-your-face way, but it's there and is kind of what Tavi is all about these days. As Tavi's novelty within the fashion world starts to wear off (right?), she's successfully becoming a real person who looks like she'll have a long and important career. She ditched her glasses, is not as excited about fashion as she once was and seems more interested in books than fashion magazines. Like any editor of a highly-anticipated new publication, Tavi's been giving interviews to promote the site and give her thoughts on things like being a boss, the Jane Pratt situation, fashion week, and more. Here are the best bits, via The Cut and MTV Style.

Summer's just about over, but teenage girls dreading the return to high school after Labor Day will at least have one thing to look forward to: Blogger-turned editor Tavi Gevinson's new online (and sometimes print) magazine, Rookie, which promises to speak to teenage girls the way Sassy did before Tavi was born. Rookie will go live this Monday on rookiemag.com. It may seem odd to launch on a holiday, but Rookie's publishing schedule is reportedly tailored to that of a teenage girl (three posts per day: one after school, one after dinner, one before bed)--and, chances are, a lot of teenage girls are going to be sitting at home on their computers monday night dreading the fate that awaits them in the morning. Here are all of the important details we've scooped up from WWD, the Times and the blog that started it all, Style Rookie!

What could have been the love child of an epic mating between new and old school, may not be anymore. WWD reports today that Sassy's Jane Pratt--now the EIC of XOJane.com--may no longer be involved with Tavi Gevinson's upcoming website, after all. Earlier this year, Tavi and Jane announced they would be collaborating on a site for teens called "Rookie." XOJane launched but there was no sign of Tavi's project. Up until this July, the blogger was still talking about it. At an event in Brooklyn, the high school sophomore dished details about the partnership, announcing the official title and what to expect in terms of design and tone. She also did a guest post on the site about the disgusting contents of her locker. According to WWD, Tavi has recently decided against launching with Say Media, the company which hosts XOJane, in order to have full control of her site.

The Olsens Gave Shoe Fittings in Central America: Mary-Kate and Ashley, who recently collaborated with Toms on a range of cashmere shoes, just took a trip with founder Blake Mycoskie to Honduras to personally give out shoes to needy kids in three different communities. Good for them! {People Style Watch} Jane Pratt won't wake up for less than $15,000: At least, she won't speak for less than that. The Observer says that is the amount they were quoted by Pratt's representation when they asked if the former Sassy editor would be available to "deliver a brief address to a small group a month from now, in New York." {New York Observer} "Billie Jean" named most stylish video: GQ ranked the 30 most stylish music videos of all time. Michael Jackson took both the #30 and #1 spots for "Thriller" and "Billy Jean," respectively. Though his red leather jacket in "Thriller" may be more memorable, Jackson's leather suit (with cropped pants), bowtie, pink socks and oxfords were pretty inspiring. {GQ} Robyn Lawley's Vogue coup: Robyn Lawley, who covered Italian Vogue's recent plus-size issue, now stars in Australian Vogue's first-ever plus-size spread. {Frockwriter}

As planned, blogger and author Tavi Gevinson gave a Sassy-themed performance at an event in Gowanus, Brooklyn on Wednesday called "The Talent Show Presents: A Tribute to Sassy Magazine." Tavi and four other girls--a band called SUPERCUTE! and a 19-year-old blogger--performed a live reenactment of the '90s teen magazine's "Dear Boy" feature. Each girl asked some dude sitting on a stool various questions about "boys" ranging from, "Should I get married?" to "Do you believe in Ghosts?" to Tavi's sweet, earnest "Um, I was tricked...and...I thought we had to ask serious questions about boys...well now it's embarrassing, but okay..." and you get the idea (Tavi starts talking around 3:40). Sadly, we weren't able to see this in real life, but thanks to YouTube and the Village Voice, we got to hear Tavi talk like a normal teenage girl about a boy she likes and also know a little more about what she has referred to as a "top secret government project."

If we were the jealous types, we’d certainly be jealous of Tavi. She’s been to the couture shows, is a Jane Pratt collaborator, and now...has two books in the works. One is a Rizzoli coffee table book and is based on her blog. The other one? We can’t quite figure out how to categorize it. A combo of Mad Libs and Choose Your Own Adventure, maybe. According to WWD, Tavi had a sleepover with author Marisa Meltzer, who penned the books How Sassy Changed My Life and Girl Power. The result? Not a bleary-eyed morning because they spent the whole night eating pizza and watching Clueless. No, instead that meeting yielded a book idea.

Tavi's first piece for XOJane.com is up! The 15-year-old blogger is currently working with Jane Pratt on a website geared towards people in her own age group. But, that doesn't mean Tavi and the contents of her bag locker aren't relevant to XOJane readers. Hence "What's in My Bag: Locker Edition." Tavi may not have a Sofia Coppola X Louis Vuitton duffle full of moleskins, passports and Chanel makeup, but I wouldn't exactly call her "What's in my bag" piece boring. There's some normal high school locker stuff, some really gross stuff and some really random stuff that does not make sense in a high school locker, like the blue wig she wore all over last fashion week, for instance. It was so messy, it took her well over the 20 alloted minutes to clean out at the end of the school year. In addition to the aforementioned wig, there were old tap shoes, deodorant, Play-Doh and a black lace veil.

The newly launched XOJane, Jane Pratt's newest online venture into the lady internet space, promised to bring back a few of Sassy and Jane's most beloved features, including Jane's "Makeunder." They made good on their word, and today put out their first "Makeunder" featuring Tinsley Mortimer of all people. That's Tinsley pre-makeunder above. Click through to see her after the girls at XOJane got their hands on her. It took only 15 minutes (the Tins said she spends two hours prepping for a red carpet event) and only five beauty products were used (she uses 15 before she faces the flashbulbs)--and after you see how she looks you're gonna want every beauty product they used on her (at least I did).

We all owe a little bit to Jane Pratt. When I say "we," I mean my generation, the generation before mine, and the generation that follows me. Growing up as a wannabe fashion writer, I admired her ingenuity and success--she was cool, she was smart, and most importantly, she made "it" happen for herself. As a reader, I appreciated her honesty. It's undeniable, especially as a teenager, that women's magazines in particular can make you feel less than adequate. With Sassy, then Jane, Pratt gave women a place to be themselves. Instead of dictating what you should be, Pratt's world celebrated who you were. From this nostalgic and unabashedly fawning intro, it's obvious I'm a huge fan of Jane Pratt's. So when I was offered the chance for Pratt to walk me through XOJane.com just a day before the launch of the site, I said yes with wild enthusiasm. But I was determined not to make a decision about whether or not I liked the content until I, you know, read the content. So yesterday I took the train up to Say Media, a company that does everything from selling online advertising to launching websites (including XOJane), to see what Pratt and co. have produced.

JanePratt.com is coming soon. The website says so. But will Tavi Gevinson's much-hyped forthcoming magazine with Jane Pratt be part of the idolized editrix's new site? And when will be able to get our mitts on Tavi's Sassy redux mag? An article in today's WWD attempts to answer those questions, despite Pratt's refusal to go on record and comment on her plans for the site.

Vice managing editor Amy Kellner announced via Twitter yesterday that she is the new executive/managing editor of JanePratt.com, a soon-to-be-launched site from the editor of Sassy, Jane, and most recently a yet-to-be-named magazine with Tavi Gevinson. According to Jezebel, an advert for the job just went up on Media Bistro last Friday, which means the decision to hire Kellner was made incredibly fast, or Pratt already had her in mind before she even put up the post. Which wouldn't be surprising. Kellner's been a fixture on the downtown scene since the mid-'90s. So she and Pratt surely know each other. And it doesn't sound like this site is part of the Tavi project, either. In fact, given Kellner's background, we doubt this site will have much to do with fashion. Surely there will be a little, but we're hoping it's more of a no-bullshit portal for women. Because other than the Hairpin, which is hilarious and awesome, and Jezebel, which is sometimes brilliant, sometimes not, most women's sites--much like most women's magazines--suck. (Why do they suck? Because they're either too ranty or too sexist. And rarely smart.) So good luck to Amy and Jane. We'll be reading from Day 1.

Tavi Gevinson interviews Gwen Stefani in February's Teen Vogue. It's her first bylined piece for the teen mag, and she begins by expressing her skepticism for celebrities who design clothes: "I can't say I'm enthusiastic about the recent celebrity-turned-designer trend. In fact, I'm a skeptic. Too often I feel people are expected to drop a couple hundred dollars just because X celebrity was good in Y sitcom, thus somehow making X's design abilities top-notch. So, though a fan of Gwen Stefani's music, I wasn't sure what to expect when I entered the L.A.M.B. studio." But by the end of her piece, after a fun girly photo shoot together in which Stefani goofs around with Gevinson and makes sarcastic jokes about how awkward it is to pose for photos, Gevinson is clearly on team Stefani. Her skepticism gone, she writes, "As Gwen showed me different ways she'd style a pair of what she nicknamed 'jailbird pants,' an old video I'd seen on YouTube came to mind: Gwen is 22, pre-fame, and showing the camera a DIY 'jailhouse dress.' That use of personal identity is what makes her designs not derive from tabloid appearances but act as a further reflection of her as an artist. Like her music, they embrace a side of her that is unabashedly unique, whether she executes it through kaleidoscope prints or by singing a friendly reminder: 'It's my life!'" Nevermind that that last sentence seems a little jumbled ("her designs not derive" say wha?). All this makes sense, of course. Gevinson wouldn't have a piece in Teen Vogue if she ended up slamming L.A.M.B. Fashion mags aren't exactly the place for hard-hitting journalism or even criticism. It's a cute piece, too, and offers readers a more personal and unfiltered look at Stefani in just a few hundred words. But here's the thing: Gevinson has announced plans to start a magazine (Sassy part deux) with Jane Pratt, presumably to offer something glossy teen fashion mags are not currently offering. Mags like, well, Teen Vogue. Gevinson has said she loves Sassy because "It called out celebrities and politicians for being assholes, educated its readers on politics without sounding biased, and focused on fashion in a way that was unconventional. It was lipstick feminism for teenage girls, covering sexist issues but not discouraging having fun with makeup or caring about boys. It included R.E.M. records as opposed to the perfume scents of today's teen magazine pages."

Media is evolving at the breakneck speed of Twitter and traditional print outlets and new media ones are constantly reorganizing and reshuffling mastheads to ensure that their publications continue to rake in advertisers and stay alive. The world of fashion media is no exception. This year there was so much playing of editorial musical chairs, we devised little flow charts to try to keep it all straight. From Carine Roitfeld's shocking departure from Vogue Paris to the fat-hating Marie Claire blogger who pissed just about everyone off, here are the top ten fashion media stories of the year.

There's something wonderfully nostalgic about looking through old magazines. The glossy pages we thumbed through when we were in our impressionable tween and teen years told us who was cool and how to look cool (and we believed them). If Tavi Gevinson's recent announcement that she will be reviving a Sassy-esque mag with Jane Pratt showed us anything, it's that the girls who grew up reading Sassy are fiercely loyal to the mag that shaped their identities in a real and lasting way. Lauren calls Jane Pratt her "personal Jesus," and wrote that "Sassy is the reason [she] became interested in fashion as a 5th grader." In her open letter to Tavi Gevinson and Jane Pratt on our blog crush The Hairpin, former Gawker scribe Emily Gould said as much, writing, "Sassy and, later, Jane got into my brain when it was at its most malleable; these magazines were such a profound influence on the way my tastes in books, magazines, bands, cute boys, and first-person writing developed that I hear their editorial voice in my head at the oddest moments, for example recently I was doing my laundry and I remembered a Jane tip about how you can use, and I think I quote? "like, half the amount of detergent" you're currently using. I remember whole blocks of text from "Tiffani-Amber Thiessen: Something Does Not Compute." I became the kind of writer and person I am in part because of these magazines." So it's with an understanding of the powerful and formative hold that the glossies we once pored over still have on us that we launch our newest series, "From the Glossy Archives." We're pulling old glossies--from Sassy to Vogue to Pop--from our bedroom shelves and from eBay and scanning in the funniest ads, the most surprising stories, and most salient editorials so we can all reminisce together. And for the true magazine nerds out there (ourselves included), we will, of course, include the masthead so we can watch the editorial musical chairs play out throughout the years. First up? We figured US Vogue from November 1988, Anna Wintour's first issue as editor-in-chief, was a good place to start. The mag is a gold mine so we'll dispense the nuggets piecemeal starting with the masthead, awesomely '80s ads, and a feature that is an ode to Alaïa (before Alaïa and Wintour hated each other). Editorials to follow. Take a look.