What type of girl is avril lavigne

E-girls are the bread-and-butter of TikTok. The term, which was originally a slur directed at female gamers and cosplayers in an attempt to shame women, has been reclaimed by users of the app and mutated into something wonderful. Aesthetically slightly similar to the scene kids of the 90s and 00s, e-girls are the antithesis to primped, Facetuned Instagram girls. Their hair is often multi-coloured and worn in bunches, piercings are practically mandatory.

Their outfits usually comprise of high waisted skirts or shorts, band T-shirts or tops with a soft-grunge, soft-punk or goth aesthetic. I know what I look like. Her debut album, Let Go , sold well over 10 million copies worldwide, and she inspired an unlikely early 00s fashion revolution of wearing school ties over tank tops. This aesthetic, as well as that from the 'Sk8er Boi' video — backwards trucker cap, studded wristbands, heavy, almost blue eyeliner, green tee, three-quarter-length cargo shorts and black white striped socks pulled up to the knees — feels inherent to the DNA of the e-girl, whose nostalgia for and homage to late 90s and early 00s is sartorially obvious.

Avril felt like a beacon for the alternative, albeit a tightly packaged and marketed alternative. She was pop adjacent, an outlier and magnet for kids who felt different but who still enjoyed the delights of pop culture. Might we call this new look "glam-grunge"? It's not, like, Gucci. Not high-end shit. Grungy but glam. Judging by the state of her scalp, it looks like she was a little over-zealous in the application of the bleach and dye.

Did she do it recently? Lavigne emits a grunted affirmation, but can't be drawn for further clarification. The only immediately pertinent fact, it seems, is that "it was my idea.

I wanted to dye it all black. But I decided I shouldn't. And Christina Aguilera did the black hair thing already. So I decided on black chunks. In the pasty flesh, Avril Lavigne affords plenty of opportunity for the scrutiny of the top of her head. For one thing, she is a wee slip of a thing: five-foot-not-much in her bare feet. For another, her crown is what she seems most comfortable presenting to the world. She sits in her chair, legs pulled up in front of her chin, head bent over as she assumes impossibly contorted positions - part yoga, part sulk - and studies the zips on her bondage trousers.

Then, picking at her hair, she discovers seemingly unlimited fractal wonders in her split ends. When she's not gazing at the floor, she's staring blankly at the kitchen beyond the glass doors of the terrace on which we're sitting. When she's not looking away, she's yawning loudly.

To be fair, it is a nice kitchen: it belongs to Bryan Adams, fellow Canadian and gravelly-rocker-turned-star-photographer. Richmond himself is on hand to help style the shoot. Also, the sun out here on the concrete terrace this Saturday afternoon is scorching. Lavigne, clad in black and slathered in make-up, is melting like a Barbie vampire.

Enjoy unlimited access to 70 million ad-free songs and podcasts with Amazon Music Sign up now for a day free trial. And she has every right to be knackered. Since landing in the UK a couple of days ago, her schedule has been mental.

Yesterday, the combination of itinerary and a hangover - courtesy of a 5am drinking session with her band in her trendy London base camp, the St Martins Lane hotel - was so punishing that she had to take herself off and have a cry. At such times, do you ever think, I wish I hadn't sold so many records?

She's sort of sweet about it, but she really can't be bothered with all this. She has to talk about the same stuff all the time, she complains: the suggestions that she's as manufactured as any clothes-shedding teen-pop strumpeteer, controversy over whether she wrote her first album, the queries as to the state of her love life.

Avril Lavigne did indeed not start out as a pop-grunge skate-kid in hoodie and baseball cap. She grew up in tiny Napanee population: 5, , Ontario, the middle child of devout Baptists John and Judy. Her mum was so strict that she wouldn't let Lavigne sing the country song "Strawberry Wine" because it has the word wine in the title. Her vocal talents were discovered at an early age, and Lavigne would sing in the church. Her first trip to a recording studio, aged 14, was to sing "Touch the Sky", a country-gospel song written for her by local singer-songwriter Stephen Medd.

The same year, she won a competition to sing a Shania Twain song in front of a 20,strong Twain audience in Ottawa three years later, she relates with evident pride, she sold out the same venue herself. Lavigne might claim to have been a tearaway at school, handy with her fists and ever ready to flee in a huff on her skateboard, but Medd has said his kids count her as "the best babysitter we ever had" and there are pictures on his website that vouch for her peachiness.

To which charges, Lavigne has the eminently straightforward response: "I was young and I was singing [Christian] music and when I got older I was like, ah, I don't wanna sing Christian music any more, or country music. So I kinda started to stop. In pursuit of a record deal, Lavigne moved to New York aged 16, chaperoned by her older brother Matt. On Under My Skin, unlike the team efforts last time round, Lavigne has written one-on-one with, among others, Moody, her guitarist Evan Taubenfeld and a year-old Canadian singer-songwriter named Chantal Kreviazuk.

She is notably chuffed that the album's first single, "Don't Tell Me", is largely one of her compositions, written when she was 17, after the recording of, but before the release of, Let Go. It obviously shows there that I'm a writer," she bristles, in a rare burst of animation. And I only wrote it with Evan, and Evan just wrote the guitar, and I wrote everything else. So that's proof that I am a writer to people who thought that maybe I didn't write.

She herself never reads interviews with other people - "I don't know why. I'd probably just look at the pictures and turn the page! That's a good thing to always tell a journalist, right? I'm not sitting here in a Chanel dress. I might get a bit crazy when I'm around my friends, but I'm not a big talker. Why would a year-old girl want to sit and talk to adults all day?

Perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised by Avril's transformation. Most of the singer's core values were established by her humble, church-going upbringing in Napanee, Ontario. Raised in a tight-knit French-Canadian family, she was a typical outdoor type, heavily influenced by a sports-crazy older brother. Now she is planning a future with husband Whibley, whom she met in and married a year ago in California. The frontman of Ontario poppunk band Sum 41, who once released an album with the alarming title Does This Look Infected?

We have both chosen the same life, so things tend to work out. We were working on our new records at the same time, and we have the same management team. That helped us to have 18 months at home together. Recording their new albums simultaneously, and in adjacent studios, even allowed Deryck and his Sum 41 bandmate Steve "Stevo" Jocz, a drummer, to put in cameo appearances on Avril's latest effort, The Best Damn Thing. A refreshingly upbeat affair, the album builds impressively on the foundations laid by 's debut, Let Go, and 's Under My Skin.

Whereas Lavigne's first collection spawned Complicated and the equally catchy Sk8er Boi, Under My Skin dealt with more serious teenage issues a family bereavement, the pressure on young girls to have sex too soon and showcased a confused young lady on the cusp of the adulthood she has now embraced. I was a moodier person when I was making that album and the songs reflected the things I was going through at the time.

Now I've grown out of that darker thing". Lavigne, with composing credits on all three of her albums, is indignant at suggestions that her contributions to the writing process are minimal.