I don't have access to the full eight page article on The New Yorker, but from the abstract, I sense that Widdicombe is maybe sporting a little chip on her shoulder. Perhaps she had an akward journey through puberty and feels the need to take it out on someone who is blossiming through the otherwise generally un-easy period of developing life.
"She is tiny for her age, four feet ten, and looks shockingly prepubescent," Widdicombe said. Perhaps that's because she is pre-pubescent. I looked like a boy until just before I turned sixteen. I had narrow akward hips, broad bony shoulders and un-cordinated tooth-pick limbs to match. Then one morning it seemed I had woken up with hips or "love handles", my arms and legs were shapley and these two jiggly things had attached themselves to my chest. It's rare that one goes from pre-pubescent to pre-pubescent-amazonian without a few bumps in the road in between, and even rarer that the genetically blessed among us (models) skip this process all together.
Widdicombe is further quoted in the article commenting on Tavi's physique in one of her recent outfits. "The dress was sleveless," she said. "You could see that her figure had changed dramatically since the earliest days of her blog. She had become curvy."
No shit. The earliest days of her blog being that Tavi was eleven. Hello?! Eleven. Of course her body is going to change. What's with the tunnel vision? We know that in modelling, the shorter girls have to compensate with a thinner frame, but Tavi isn't a model, she's a blogger. An insightful, eloquent, precocious, whip-smart, level headed nice girl in an industry that eats nice girls for breakfast. Sure, there's the novelty of her age in ratio to her success, but please do keep in mind that Tavi isn't a daughter of a rocker, designer or art dealer. The surname printed on her birth cirfiticate didn't seal her fate as a Missoni, Jagger or Versace. Sure, Tavi is that one in a million, but regardless of her involvement in the fashion industry, is it right for girls as young as fourteen be labelled as curvy? I hardly think so.
As one commenter in an NY Mag article said, "girls have thrown up for a lot less".
