I feel like now fashion is just part of how I think about everything. When I send out a mood board to our contributors every month about our monthly theme, there are photos from our fashion shows, but there are also film stills and album art.
I'm a big journaler, so for every new journal, I would change the way my room looked and change the posters on the walls, and I would change what I was wearing, and I would have a playlist, and it all kind of corresponded and matched, and I would change my handwriting in the journals.
I'm really thankful for every experience I've had, even the ones that were puzzling or disorienting, because they taught me so much.
When you're a kid you're already trying to create your own world and organize the one in front of you, but then you get all insecure around 6th grade and don't think you have a right to share that.
People don't know what to do when writing a story with teens that takes place now - they think you have to make a bunch of references to Facebook.
The idea that feeling confident and feeling misunderstood are mutually exclusive really bugs me.
I don't know if I'll ever make rap music, but I just like people who are like, 'I am going to just find the medium that's best for this idea and master it and do that.'
'Rookie' is not your guide to Being a Teen. It is, quite simply, a bunch of writing and art we like and believe in.
If there is something that strikes me as interesting or beautiful or something I could learn from, and I don't write it down, then I could be at lunch with you, and it's like there's a pile of laundry in my brain that I haven't put away, and I struggle to really listen, so that's always been important to me.
I've witnessed so many meetings and conferences where people are trying to figure out what young people think, and my feeling has consistently been that you should just ask them.
With the release of her fourth album, 'Red,' in 2012 and a handful of highly publicized romances, Taylor was criticized by the press and other entertainers for such sinful acts as dating people and writing songs about it, gaining a reputation as boy-crazy and love-ridden.
Since the age of 14, I have littered - excuse me, adorned - the Internet with Taylor Swift analyses.
Sometimes 'Rookie' is written about like, 'Finally! Something for alternative girls!' and I'm like, 'No!' Obviously it's not for everyone, but I used to think that there are cheerleaders, and there are art kids.
Taylor's first four albums have been certified platinum a combined 21 times, but despite her unprecedented success in country music, '1989' is strictly pop.
For all of the continued awareness of systemic violence and oppression, there isn't a lot of talk about that psychological toll of racism, at least in white circles and white media.
Interviewing Rei Kawakubo in Tokyo and John Galliano in Paris, both for 'Pop' magazine, were huge for me, not just in learning about fashion and writing but about how little desire I had to be a critic/reporter/journalist/commentator so much as a kind of travel diarist.
Sometimes you want something really serious that makes you feel emotional and makes you think, and sometimes you do just want a pop song. What I love about Taylor Swift is that she offers both.
I think it's just important to be able to keep things to myself and to have these moments that can't be - where I don't put them out and feel like they could be misunderstood, you know?
One of my intentions with 'Rookie' is for the girls reading it to know that they are already cool enough and smart enough and pretty enough.
If I'm thrifting, and I find this great dress, but it won't fit me, and I won't grow into it because I'm impossibly tiny, I don't want to let it sit there. I'll buy it and send it to a friend.
The idea of being a 'child star' always sounded awful to people my age, and so I was just very aware that these things are kind of fleeting and that a lot of it didn't have to do with me: it had to do with my age; it had to do with whatever came to mind when people thought of a young internet sensation.
I love art, but I don't think I'm especially good at it. Fashion I think I could imagine, but I'm not really sure. I think it's easiest for me to picture myself in music.
I've worked with a few coaches, and I did theater camp when I was younger, and I think what was good was when I was younger, it was never intense Interlochen theater camp.
That young people don't have valid thoughts about the world because they haven't been alive long enough is sadly a very popular and, frankly, unoriginal sentiment. When I think about that time, I was just responding to the world around me.
I think people get excited about someone discovering something that blew their mind when they were younger. I think it makes people kind of nostalgic and happy. That's one of the really great things about the Internet, that it can bring people together in that way of just being interested in the same stuff.
Solange's new album, 'A Seat at the Table', is so many things at once: an antidote to hate, a celebration of blackness, an expression of the right to feel it all. After a move to Louisiana and period of self-reflection, the artist joined forces with a range of collaborators to put her new discoveries to music.
Every day, I kind of have in my brain a few slots of what I want to do. Like school, sleep, homework, 'Rookie,' hanging out with friends, mindless relaxation time, and then trying to do my own creative things.
I think that when people who've had success from a young age go through a train-wreck cycle, it's usually because they're working on someone else's terms, so they feel the need to rebel. But when it's something you've built, you don't have that same kind of resentment or angstiness. But it's also difficult to keep those standards for yourself.
With acting, I felt like I had a lot to prove because I didn't study it; I didn't work my way up in a traditional sense.
I created 'Rookie' because I read a lot of websites that I thought were cool and interesting, but they weren't for teens, and I wanted us to have something that could be ours.
I'd seen 'The Sopranos,' but I wasn't a faithful viewer because I can't handle it.
I think what human beings need is to be able to laugh at the absurd, hold on to ambiguity, and learn to love nuance, instead of making everything one or the other, and structurally, so much of the Internet and online publishing doesn't have room for any of that.
One thing that I always liked about fashion was that it was tied in with music and art and film.
I try to be very honest in my writing. It's amazing, though, to think that people are responding to what we do, but it's okay if they're responding in a positive way too, because I think just creating anything at all to put out there is a gift.
When I first watched Bette Davis in 'All About Eve', I was struck by how much I felt that she is Margo Channing and that she's Bette Davis, where she was able to do both, where you're like, 'What an icon.'
I usually end up making a huge mess every morning when I get dressed. My outfit affects my whole day. I'm always running late, and I'm always trying to make sure I feel really good in what I'm wearing, because if you're wearing something you're not comfortable in, it ruins your day.
I no longer get into stupid thought wormholes about identity and stuff. At one time, I did have some impostor syndrome about acting, but then I remembered I've been doing this since I was little, actually.
I'm really good at making teen angst romantic. I'm really good at dealing with heartbreak and things like that and making it into this whole experience. But there's no way to make someone-on-the-Internet-said-something-mean-about-me into romantic angst where you can listen to music and cry or whatever.
I love the Internet, but I think you have to only use it in the ways that are good for you. I think there's so much speculation that happens.
I think everybody should go to high school. It's horrible, and it unites you with other people.
One thing I've learned in my limited experience is you can justify anything intellectually. There are a million reasons to stay with someone, and a million reasons to end something - so you can really only trust your gut.
I got into one of the schools I applied to because of the essay I wrote about Holly Hunter's character in 'Broadcast News.' She's the only female producer on this news network, and she's really good at her job, but she allots time in her day to just sit at her desk and cry. And then she's just back to work. I find that really effective.
Before 'This is Our Youth', I did a week of table reading 'Airline Highway' at Steppenwolf in Chicago while the author, Lisa D'Amour, workshopped it.
Some of my clothes are things that we'd play dress up with when we were little, and it's funny that now I'm wearing it, like, as an everyday thing. But if I say 'vintage' or 'thrifted' on the blog, there's this community of fashion bloggers, and I've become sort of tight with some of them, and we, like, just send each other packages.
People ask me about the decision to transition from fashion to 'Rookie' magazine. But it wasn't a decision. I was 14, and my interests were changing.
I'm good at utilising body parts as letters.
I don't know that a lot of boys read 'Rookie', but we get quite a few nice comments and e-mails from them. To say I'm devoted to making it girls-only is a little extreme, because I don't actively try to exclude everyone else, just make sure girls know that this space is for them first and foremost.
I feel like one thing that a lot of creative people go through is that they feel like they don't have the right to be creative or to put their stuff out there. I'm glad that blogging from a young age kind of got that out of the way for me.
I get kind of sad when I look at all of my magazines and think about how at one time I was much more impressed with a certain fashion editorial, or how I feel like I can't really relate to being that excited about fashion anymore. Maybe it's being jaded, but I honestly like that now, when something's really good, I feel more affected by it.
