What Is It About an It Girl?

I’m not sure what the collective noun for It girls is. A beguile of It girls? A tousle? A clutch? This week saw a package of It-girl essays examining a century of the phenomenon and asking current It girls to help define the term. Hari Nef calls It-girl-ness “an ineffable quality,” it’s a label Chloë Sevigny “can’t shake,” and Ella Emhoff knows “It’s not that deep. It’s fun…. There’s no pressure. But then there’s also a lot of pressure.” Wikipedia defines It girls as women who’ve achieved a high level of popularity without flaunting their sexuality. (I feel slightly yikes about the idea that women have to be chaste to have societal virtue, but we move on.) Breton-lover Edie Sedgwick, Manhattan’s own Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and the infamous indoor equestrian Bianca Jagger all made the list.

Part of the 100-year intrigue is that an It girl is a nebulous concept. She’s always a hot girl, sure, but she’s also a hot media property. Initially she’s a break from a certain homogeny, but she eventually ushers in a new kind of homogeny. She has an influence that never tips into Influencer (shudder). She’s a presenter, a model, a DJ, a muse, and a moment. (Rarely is she a foodie or a biochemist or a tech entrepreneur or a working mother.) She’s a socialite, but not like a regular socialite—a cool socialite. She can be an uptown girl or a grubby downtown party rat. In Britain we have a barometer of relatability for our prime ministers: Would you have a drink with him (or her)? I suppose the mark of an It girl is whether she’d dance first on an empty dance floor or let you bum her last smoke.

The truth is that Its are more than the sum of their parts. They are pure zeitgeist, charisma incarnate, hard to describe linguistically, the same way the word “love” doesn’t come close to all the sublime, silly, big, and little feels associated with it. Roughly speaking, when it comes to It girls, men want her, women want to be her, gays want to meme her. 

Sevigny is my personal fave, a woman who’s never put a sartorial foot wrong because of her killer instinct away from the expected. I’m always navigating the fine line between aesthetically daring and aesthetic dickhead, between fashion muse and fashion victim. Sevigny has balanced it perfectly for decades; I could look at that picture of her as Joan of Arc forever. When The Strokes sang “Is This It”? They meant Chloë Sevigny.   

All Its have innate taste, not so much effortless as entrenched, and taste is female currency, traded in clothes and interiors and locations for mini breaks. It sounds shallow and frivolous—it is shallow and frivolous—but our choices and desires, the things we covet versus the things we ditch, are integral to who we are and our senses of self. The patriarchy (not him again!) will have you believe this is all superficial, but it’s self-expression, pure and simple. Fashion moves through phases, and your personal style, your take on that, is your daily art form. Never underestimate the power of a great fit.

It girls do tend to be aesthetically similar, but I’m not even slightly rattled that the list is predominantly white, predominantly blonde, predominantly thin. There are exceptions to this trinity as we move historically through past Its and into present Its. Modern Its reflect our broadening idea of intoxicating pizzazz; white, blonde, and thin was a default setting for too long. 

The It prefix isn’t damaging, but it is limiting. It girls want to outgrow their It-ness, in the same way funny people want to be seen as incredibly hot. (I’m already paging Dr. Freud, don’t worry.) It-girl professions become incidental to their auras, which sounds a bit reductive, but who among us doesn’t want to be arrestingly beguiling? It’s a poisoned chalice most of us would sip from if we could. People obsessed with my je ne sais quoi? Sign me up. 

Culture has shifted. We’re all broadcasting all the time, famous in tiny circles of friends and followers. Once measured in Page Six column inches, those nebulous It qualities are more likely to be calculated in likes. I wonder if the idea of a big It girl is dying, fading from view like the northern lights? As people self-promote, as personal success becomes less and less about mass mainstream appeal, I can’t help but wonder: Are we post-It?