It’s not easy being 62, but 13 isn’t any picnic either. That’s what I’m thinking after a few days spent catching up with the career of Tavi Gevinson.

Eleven when she started her Style Rookie blog in 2008, Gevinson, who hails from the outskirts of Chicago, has become one of those fashion bloggers who gets front-row seats on the international show circuit.

But simply because of her age, Gevinson, like a kitten landing in the company of old cats, has been scrutinized and, sometimes, resented.

On Sunday, March 21 at 5:30 p.m. (et) on CTV, she makes her first appearance as a guest reporter for FashionTelevision, with a second report scheduled for the following episode of FT airing March 28.

Before watching an advance screener of Sunday’s program, I dipped into Gevinson’s postings. I was prepared to be impressed, having noticed in the press material a list of her favourite designers. They include Rei Kawakubo (Comme des Garçons), Vivienne Westwood, Kate and Laura Mulleavy (Rodarte), Tao Kurihara (Tao), Alexander McQueen, Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren (Viktor & Rolf), Yohji Yamamoto (Y-3), Maison Martin Margiela, Junya Watanabe, Luella Bartley, and Gareth Pugh.

Far from the Gossip Girl glamour to which so many of today’s jeunes filles seem to aspire, Gevinson’s choices run to the bold, daring, difficult, provocative, experimental, the kind of thing that has for the past several years been eclipsed by strapless cocktail wear.

And the optimism I was feeling from this foretaste of her taste survived a visit to her blog. Style Rookie is smart, funny, original and wide-ranging in subject matter. One day it’s dodge ball; another, it’s Rodarte. A soul-mate of the Mulleavy sisters, she offers an analysis of their fall 2010 collection that is unpretentious and plausible and expressed in prose that is fey without being affected: “the fabrics were drifty and the characters vulnerable.”

In other entries, she talks about how she always tries to come up with some character behind what she herself wears; she decks herself out as Blanche Dubois, Tennessee Williams’ mad heroine; she considers the suspicions that fashion bloggers are prey to and refers her reader to a rousing piece of writing by Dave Eggers on the subject of selloutitude. Last summer, she posted a picture of her 13th-birthday cake, with an image of Bob Dylan in frosting on top, and cited an excerpt from her Bat Mitzvah speech, archived under the heading, “Superficiality of Clothing and . . . Judaism?”

Because it had been only a few days before that I had watched the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, I found myself thinking of Gevinson as serious, with lots asides as if from an intellectual comic. And that was even before I read her passing reference to herself as “neurotic paranoid Jew.”

Although serious and young, Gevinson is as unbridled as old bat in her willingness to dress herself in outrageous costume. She sticks to a philosophy she once summarized as “no rules, no restrictions, no normalcy, no pleasing anyone.”

On FashionTelevision she likens herself to Edie Beale “or some crazy grandma.” Arriving on assignment at the Alexander Wang show in New York, she has on a Crazy Jane brocade turban over her Andy Warhol-grey hair, and a plaid stole wrapped around a top, in a vividly green and yellow tie-dye pattern, that is from Proenza Schouler and that Gevinson has described as “totally” one of the favourite things she owns.

My favourite moment from this week’s episode of FT: Tavi Gevinson holds a microphone before Diane Von Furstenberg and DVF starts talking as if she were tending a cradle and telling some kid the story of the three bears.

The subject was courtesans the last time we talked. They’re back on the bill. This go-round in connection to On A Pedestal: From Renaissance Chopines to Baroque Heels, the great–no guff–new exhibition running at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto until next September.

All about platforms–which is what chopines are–and heels, trends that were major in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the show couldn’t be more timely.

I know I’m repeating what I said last week writing about the show for the Toronto Star. But it really does deliver a kick of pertinence, aptness, whatever you want to call it when something feels right for now. Now, of course, the word would be resonance, these days being an era that for the past several years has been resonating love for crazy, high, crazy-high footwear.

The topic has become a specialty of Bata curator Elizabeth Semmerlhack, responsible for On A Pedestal, both the exhibition and the worthy catalogue–perfect for stuffing those stilettos that soon will be hung by the chimney with care.

And before that, Semmelhack had already invested her vigorous scholarship in another show and book, Heights of Fashion: A History of the Elevated Shoe.

Paying particular attention to the gender politics that play out on our tootsies, Semmelhack has noticed that throughout the history of Western fashion extreme heights have been a favourite of the sex worker.

Indeed, the spike-heeled, platform-soled killers that have lately been doing brisk trade in the toniest shoe departments were not that many years back to be seen tramping the dark end of the street or stepping out of the windows of boutiques dealing in adult novelties.

In Renaissance Italy, where the most extreme action in On A Pedestal takes place, Venetian courtesans were fans of some of the tallest chopines. They made such towering displays of themselves that they became tourist attractions.

On very special loan from the Museo Palazzo Mocenigo in Venice are chopines–so rare that they are not being allowed to travel anywhere after Toronto–measuring over 50 cm in height.

In the Renaissance, there were attendants to provide the necessary arms to lean on. Today, they would be backup dancers in service to pop divas who have recently been endorsing impossibly high heels. For now, Lady Gaga, with her 25 cm McQueens, holds bragging rights.

The last time that outrageous platforms were the rage was the 1970s. Back then, however, they were most vividly associated with male rock stars, glamourous peacocks such as Elton John. In her Heights of Fashion book, Semmelhack includes a picture of Gene Simmons of KISS performing in gigantic platforms that were red-eyed, tiger-toothed monsters, a forerunner in fierceness to the armoured claws that are those McQueens.

Courtesans have been cropping up at the cinema. In Coco Before Chanel, a movie of surprisingly engaging performances, perhaps the best is that of the brilliant Emmanuelle Devos in the part of Emilienne d’Alen�on, a celebrity whore of the Belle �poque, whose johns came from the horsy set and included eight fellows from the Jockey Club of Paris who formed a company to keep her in money, horses and paintings.

D’Alen�on’s name is invoked in a list of les grandes horizontales that opens Ch�ri, a film adaptation of two short novels by Colette that recently landed at Blockbuster and that features Michelle Pfeiffer as the fictional L�a de Lonvas, a huntress who gets captured by the game, at 49 going from kept to keeper.

Ch�ri is her charge. The son of Madame Peloux,  an old trampoline, all cluttered and catty, saying to L�a things like “You smell so good. Don’t you find now the skin’s a little less firm it holds perfume so much better,” Ch�ri is an insolent 19-year-old who wears silk pajamas and doeskin mules. She and he play fight over pearls. “Why don’t you give me your necklace?’ he teases, “It looks as well on me as on you–and better.”

No big whoop at the box office when it opened theatrically last summer, the movie has generated buzz of Oscar noms for Pfeiffer and for costume design, by Consolata Boyle–what a great name–an Irish woman previously nominated for her work on The Queen.

Boyle, who nails Ch�ri’s pj’s, dresses L�a in East-meets-West dresses with kimono sleeves and empire-waistlines that define her as a modern woman who wears her body unbound, in bed and elsewhere. In contrast, her way long hair–below her waist–seems to be an encumbrance. Could be period authenticity or an abuse of contemporary extension technology.

Otherwise, heads are covered by beautiful hats galore. There’s the same kind of showy millinery that was on view in The Duchess and since then in Bright Star, that tells the story of the love between the poet John Keats and the fashion-conscious Fanny Brawne. If less fuss had been made of the hats, I might not have become obsessed with wondering if there was a time in British history when–even by such original dressers as Brawne–straw bonnets would have been worn against leafless branches.

Fashion’s recent infatuation with feathers seems to have inspired new gusto in historical recreations. In Ch�ri, the aigrette is acknowledged. Meanwhile, Ch�ri’s hair, just as Colette wrote that it was, is “like the plumage of a blackbird.” Otherwise, his appearance is ruled by his slender silhouette, very Dior Homme, very Mick Jagger.

A co-star of Jagger in Performance, the 1970 cult film, Anita Pallenberg, who got busted for dope in Toronto along with Keith Richards in 1977, shows up in Ch�ri as La Copine who seems to run a house of the rising sun where services include opium, expertly stretched like taffy–”Can I fix you a pipe?”–as well as, according to Colette, “a tearful cordiality and a constant encouragement to be sad.”

Director Stephen Frears also had fun with twisted casting by hiring drag artist Bette Bourne to play the Baroness de la Berche who, again in Colette’s prose, “squared her shoulders, broad as country parson’s, beneath a huge face which age had masculinized to an alarming degree.”

After a summer of big, green trees and wonderful cloud formations, we’re back on the air. Sadly, Peggy Hill will not be. The wife of Hank Hill, aka King of the Hill, has passed; the final first-run episode of that animated television series ran last month.

Good-bye to my program. Thought the world of Peg: her dropped-temple frames; her plain-talking sportswear separates, shells and shorts; her sensitivity about her big feet; her bigger ego, her musings. “You know it’s autumn when the leaves are leaving and the pine needles are sticking around.”

Like so many of us bloggers, she thought she could write. Tried to be cool. Her ambition was most nakedly on display when she set out to mingle with cooler company, to make fashionable friends. Part of her makeover was a new way of tying her scarf, folded in half to form a loop through which are passed two loose ends. Touching really and so odd that a scarf style that started out as a stylist’s gesture in the 1980s should have spread so far and hung in so long. It’s an affectation that’s stuck.

Like Peg Hill, now I’m musing in high gear. That’s what blogging can do to a person.

The long scarf has also been in fashion for the long haul, wrapped a few times around the neck and left there even indoors. That’s the part I like the best, panache without any point whatsoever.

The muffled throat has been but one aspect of whole blurring of the line between what’s worn outdoors or in. I guess it started with baseball caps, which some guys refused to remove under any circumstances. Then it was the scarf thing. And more recently, it’s been coats, as in ensembles of coats and dresses–coats and anything, for that matter. It makes it difficult to know whether people are coming or going; makes it seem that they’re biding their time till something better comes along. It’s like sunglasses after dark, socially distancing.

– David Livingstone

The other morning Jessica Lange was on The View. She was talking about the TV-movie version of Grey Gardens, out now on DVD, in which she gives an Emmy-nominated performance as Edith Bouvier Beale, an elderly, derelict, loony aunt of Jackie Kennedy.

Lange talked about being in makeup for the character, about what a lesson it was. What she learned was that we never have any idea of what we look like.

How she saw herself was not connected to how she actually appeared. Out of makeup, Lange finds it’s the same: she has no idea of what visual she’s presenting to the world until she catches sight of it in a mirror.

 As I write this, I’m trying to see myself, which consists mostly of bringing back to mind what I last saw in the looking glass. Otherwise, there’s a blissful nothing. It’s a vapid routine. There’s not much there but a sleepy fog, a creamy blur, a drowned-out dream, as if the veins were filled with Propofol, milk of amnesia.

Did Michael Jackson have any idea of what he looked like?

As chance has it, memories of Jackson are raging just as fashion is hell-bent on bringing back the 1980s. It seems to me that that decade has been coming back ever since it left. This go round, it’s tough-chic leather that is the primary focus of the revival.

The 1980s–that’s when grandmothers took up with pleated leather pants. How scarring for the grandkids! In fall collections, jackets represent the trend most noticeably. Hence the hoopla about biker chicks and biker chic and biker chick chic.

Googled, Biker Chick yields pieces to complete the look. On one site, I located a source for shoe-laced t-shirts, tube tops with suspenders, tank tops with spaghetti straps.

Strapped in many ways, Toronto, where I live, can sometimes seem like no one’s kind of town–or the ten-cent town under a quarter moon or the town without pity. A recent garbage strike only added to an atmosphere that seems slovenly, inept, reactionary, a breeding ground for the Four Walls and One Dirty Window blues.

That’s the worst case, presented by a grump. However, one of the city’s brightest blessings is Cinematheque Ontario, which year after year, season after season, offers the most tantalizing film programs.

Running until August 22 is a series called Nouvelle Vague: The French New Wave Then and Now. It’s the Now part that is most inspiring. It’s a reminder of how many great French directors are alive and well and sticking to their style. It makes for an impressive list:

Claude Chabrol, born 1930
Jacques Rivette, 1928
Alain Resnais, 1922
Agn�s Varda, 1928
Jean Luc Godard, 1930
Eric Rohmer, 1920