"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'."[1] 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."[2] 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[3] and the doorman at the Ambassador hotel[4] on her "It men" list.
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The invention of the concept "It" is often attributed to Elinor Glyn, who wrote the original magazine story which inspired the film It. However, Rudyard Kipling[5], in the short story "Mrs. Bathurst", had introduced "It" as early as 1904.[6][7][8]
In the introduction to the film, Glyn described the term thus:
and
Glyn stated that "Personality plus", was the rock-bottom definition[9] 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[10] introduced the term "It" to the cultural lexicon. Bow said she wasn't sure what "It" meant,[11] although she identified Lana Turner,[12] and later Marilyn Monroe,[13] as It girls, and Robert Mitchum as an It man.[14]
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 Kelly.[15]
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's muse, Edie Sedgwick, was dubbed the "It Girl".[16]
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."[17]
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".