It girl
Encyclopedia
"It girl" is a term for a young woman who possess the quality "It", absolute attraction.
The early usage of the concept "it" in this meaning may be seen in a story by Rudyard Kipling
: "It isn't beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It's just 'It'."
Elinor Glyn
lectured: "With 'It' you win all men if you are a woman and all women if you are a man. 'It' can be a quality of the mind as well as a physical attraction."
The expression reached global attention in 1927, with the film It
, starring Clara Bow
.
While "it girls" of today are commonly young females in the worlds of fashion or show-business, the original concept focused on personality. Kipling's "Mrs. Bathurst" was a middle-aged widow, and Glyn significantly kept both Benito Mussolini
and the doorman at the Ambassador hotel on her "It men" list.
, who wrote the original magazine story which inspired the film It
. However, Rudyard Kipling
, in the short story "Mrs. Bathurst", had introduced "It" as early as 1904.
In the introduction to the film, Glyn described the term thus:
and
Glyn stated that "Personality plus", was the rock-bottom definition and that "conceit" destroyed "It".
However, the movie also plays with the notion that "It" is a quality which eschews definitions and categories, consequently the girl portrayed by Bow is an amalgam of an ingenue
and a femme fatale
, with a touch of "material girl". By contrast, her rival is equally young and comely, and rich, blonde and well-bred to boot, but she simply hasn't got "It".
The movie was planned as a special showcase for the popular Paramount Studios star Clara Bow
, and her spectacular performance introduced the term "It" to the cultural lexicon. Bow said she wasn't sure what "It" meant, although she identified Lana Turner
, and later Marilyn Monroe
, as It girls, and Robert Mitchum
as an It man.
.
Andy Warhol
's muse
, Edie Sedgwick
, was dubbed the "It Girl".
The writer William Donaldson
observed that, having initially been coined in the 1920s, the term was applied in the 1990s to describe "a young woman of noticeable 'sex appeal' who occupied herself by shoe shopping and party-going."
American actress and former model Chloë Sevigny
was described as an "it girl" by The New York Times
editor Jay McInerney
in the early 1990s because of her status as a fashion impresario.
It Girls (2002) is a feature documentary film directed by Robin Melanie Leacock
, which chronicles the activities of a group of socialites in Manhattan
during New York Fashion Week
.
In Britain, the "it girl" label has been widely and consistently applied by the media since the mid 1990s to Tara Palmer-Tomkinson
and her friend Tamara Beckwith
, both of whom come from affluent backgrounds.
In Lisi Harrison's young adult novel series, The Clique, set in an all-girls middle school, the term is used in a subtly different sense: whereas the leader of the eponymous clique is described as the "alpha" or "Queen Bee", her right-hand-woman or "beta" is also termed the "It girl", being physically more attractive.
The British underground newspaper International Times
, also known as IT, used as its logo a black-and-white image of Theda Bara
, vampish star of silent films. The founders' original intention had been to incorporate an image of Clara Bow
, but an image of Theda Bara was used by accident and, once deployed, was never changed. The paper's logo is therefore sometimes called "the it girl".
The early usage of the concept "it" in this meaning may be seen in a story by Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature...
: "It isn't beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It's just 'It'."
Elinor Glyn
Elinor Glyn
Elinor Glyn , born Elinor Sutherland, was a British novelist and scriptwriter who pioneered mass-market women's erotic fiction. She popularized the concept It...
lectured: "With 'It' you win all men if you are a woman and all women if you are a man. 'It' can be a quality of the mind as well as a physical attraction."
The expression reached global attention in 1927, with the film It
It (1927 film)
It is a 1927 silent romantic comedy film which tells the story of a shop girl who sets her sights on the handsome and wealthy boss of the department store where she works. Because of this film, actress Clara Bow became known as the "It girl"...
, starring Clara Bow
Clara Bow
Clara Gordon Bow was an American actress who rose to stardom in the silent film era of the 1920s. It was her appearance as a spunky shopgirl in the film It that brought her global fame and the nickname "The It Girl." Bow came to personify the roaring twenties and is described as its leading sex...
.
While "it girls" of today are commonly young females in the worlds of fashion or show-business, the original concept focused on personality. Kipling's "Mrs. Bathurst" was a middle-aged widow, and Glyn significantly kept both Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....
and the doorman at the Ambassador hotel on her "It men" list.
Kipling, Glyn and Clara Bow
The invention of the concept "It" is often attributed to Elinor GlynElinor Glyn
Elinor Glyn , born Elinor Sutherland, was a British novelist and scriptwriter who pioneered mass-market women's erotic fiction. She popularized the concept It...
, who wrote the original magazine story which inspired the film It
It (1927 film)
It is a 1927 silent romantic comedy film which tells the story of a shop girl who sets her sights on the handsome and wealthy boss of the department store where she works. Because of this film, actress Clara Bow became known as the "It girl"...
. However, Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature...
, in the short story "Mrs. Bathurst", had introduced "It" as early as 1904.
In the introduction to the film, Glyn described the term thus:
- "It" is that quality possessed by some which draws all others with its magnetic force. With "It" you win all men if you are a woman and all women if you are a man.
and
- Self-confidence and indifference whether you are pleasing or not and something in you that gives the impression that you are not at all cold.
Glyn stated that "Personality plus", was the rock-bottom definition and that "conceit" destroyed "It".
However, the movie also plays with the notion that "It" is a quality which eschews definitions and categories, consequently the girl portrayed by Bow is an amalgam of an ingenue
Ingenue (stock character)
See also Disingenuous, which is not quite the antonym that it may seem!The ingénue is a stock character in literature, film, and a role type in the theatre; generally a girl or a young woman who is endearingly innocent and wholesome. Ingenue may also refer to a new young actress or one typecast in...
and a femme fatale
Femme fatale
A femme fatale is a mysterious and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers in bonds of irresistible desire, often leading them into compromising, dangerous, and deadly situations. She is an archetype of literature and art...
, with a touch of "material girl". By contrast, her rival is equally young and comely, and rich, blonde and well-bred to boot, but she simply hasn't got "It".
The movie was planned as a special showcase for the popular Paramount Studios star Clara Bow
Clara Bow
Clara Gordon Bow was an American actress who rose to stardom in the silent film era of the 1920s. It was her appearance as a spunky shopgirl in the film It that brought her global fame and the nickname "The It Girl." Bow came to personify the roaring twenties and is described as its leading sex...
, and her spectacular performance introduced the term "It" to the cultural lexicon. Bow said she wasn't sure what "It" meant, although she identified Lana Turner
Lana Turner
Lana Turner was an American actress.Discovered and signed to a film contract by MGM at the age of sixteen, Turner first attracted attention in They Won't Forget . She played featured roles, often as the ingenue, in such films as Love Finds Andy Hardy...
, and later Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe was an American actress, singer, model and showgirl who became a major sex symbol, starring in a number of commercially successful motion pictures during the 1950s....
, as It girls, and Robert Mitchum
Robert Mitchum
Robert Charles Durman Mitchum was an American film actor, author, composer and singer and is #23 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest male American screen legends of all time...
as an It man.
Musical
Glyn's movie script was adapted into a musical called The It Girl, which opened off-Broadway in 2001 at the York Theatre Company starring Jean Louisa KellyJean Louisa Kelly
Jean Louisa Kelly is an American actress and singer. She is perhaps best known for her long-running role as Kim Warner on the television sitcom Yes, Dear.-Career:...
.
Modern "It girls"
Since 1927, the term has been extended beyond the world of film, to whoever in society, fashion or the performing arts was in vogue at the time, and eventually to mere "media celebrities".Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol
Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...
's muse
Warhol superstar
Warhol superstars were a clique of New York City personalities promoted by Andy Warhol during the 1960s and early 1970s. These personalities appeared in Warhol's artworks and accompanied him in his social life...
, Edie Sedgwick
Edie Sedgwick
Edith Minturn "Edie" Sedgwick was an American actress, socialite, model and heiress. She is best known for being one of Andy Warhol's superstars. Sedgwick became known as "The Girl of the Year" in 1965 after starring in several of Warhol's short films in the 1960s...
, was dubbed the "It Girl".
The writer William Donaldson
William Donaldson
Charles William Donaldson was an English satirist, writer, playboy and, under the pseudonym of Henry Root, author of The Henry Root Letters.-Life and career:...
observed that, having initially been coined in the 1920s, the term was applied in the 1990s to describe "a young woman of noticeable 'sex appeal' who occupied herself by shoe shopping and party-going."
American actress and former model Chloë Sevigny
Chloë Sevigny
Chloë Stevens Sevigny is an American film actress, fashion designer and former model. Sevigny gained reputation for her eclectic fashion sense and developed a broad career in the fashion industry in the mid 1990s, both for modeling and for her work at New York's Sassy magazine, which labeled her...
was described as an "it girl" by The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
editor Jay McInerney
Jay McInerney
John Barrett McInerney Jr. is an American writer. His novels include Bright Lights, Big City; Ransom; Story of My Life; Brightness Falls; and The Last of the Savages...
in the early 1990s because of her status as a fashion impresario.
It Girls (2002) is a feature documentary film directed by Robin Melanie Leacock
Robin Melanie Leacock
Robin Melanie Leacock is a documentary filmmaker who directed "It Girls", "A Passion For Giving" and "I'll Take Manhattan"."It Girls" is a documentary film about fashion that aired nationally in the U.S. on April 2 and 7 2002...
, which chronicles the activities of a group of socialites in Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
during New York Fashion Week
New York Fashion Week
The semi-annual New York Fashion Week, branded Mercedes-Benz FashionWeek in 2009, is held in February and September of each year in New York City. It is one of four major fashion weeks held around the world .-History:The first New York Fashion Week, then called Press Week, was the world's first...
.
In Britain, the "it girl" label has been widely and consistently applied by the media since the mid 1990s to Tara Palmer-Tomkinson
Tara Palmer-Tomkinson
Tara Palmer-Tomkinson also known as T P-T, is an English socialite, "it girl", television presenter, columnist and model...
and her friend Tamara Beckwith
Tamara Beckwith
Tamara Beckwith is an English socialite, noted for her coverage in glossy celebrity magazines such as OK! and Hello! magazine.-Early life:...
, both of whom come from affluent backgrounds.
In Lisi Harrison's young adult novel series, The Clique, set in an all-girls middle school, the term is used in a subtly different sense: whereas the leader of the eponymous clique is described as the "alpha" or "Queen Bee", her right-hand-woman or "beta" is also termed the "It girl", being physically more attractive.
The British underground newspaper International Times
International Times
International Times was an underground newspaper founded in London in 1966. Editors included Hoppy, David Mairowitz, Pete Stansill, Barry Miles, Jim Haynes and playwright Tom McGrath...
, also known as IT, used as its logo a black-and-white image of Theda Bara
Theda Bara
Theda Bara , born Theodosia Burr Goodman, was an American silent film actress – one of the most popular of her era, and one of cinema's earliest sex symbols. Her femme fatale roles earned her the nickname "The Vamp" . The term "vamp" soon became a popular slang term for a sexually predatory woman...
, vampish star of silent films. The founders' original intention had been to incorporate an image of Clara Bow
Clara Bow
Clara Gordon Bow was an American actress who rose to stardom in the silent film era of the 1920s. It was her appearance as a spunky shopgirl in the film It that brought her global fame and the nickname "The It Girl." Bow came to personify the roaring twenties and is described as its leading sex...
, but an image of Theda Bara was used by accident and, once deployed, was never changed. The paper's logo is therefore sometimes called "the it girl".
See also
- 15 minutes of fame15 minutes of fame15 minutes of fame is short-lived, often ephemeral, media publicity or celebrity of an individual or phenomenon. The expression was coined by Andy Warhol, who said in 1968 that "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." The phenomenon is often used in reference to...
- Celebutante
- Famous for being famousFamous for being famousFamous for being famous, in popular culture terminology, refers to someone who attains celebrity status for no particular identifiable reason, or who achieves fame through association with a celebrity. The term is a pejorative, suggesting that the individual has no particular talents or abilities...
- Sex symbolSex symbolA sex symbol is a celebrity of either gender, typically an actor, musician, supermodel, teen idol, or sports star, noted for their sex appeal. The term was first used in the mid 1950s in relation to the popularity of certain Hollywood stars, especially Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte...
- SocialiteSocialiteA socialite is a person who participates in social activities and spends a significant amount of time entertaining and being entertained at fashionable upper-class events....
External links
- Clara Bow, the original It girl