It Girl




Clara Bow

  It girl

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An It girl or It-girl is an attractive young woman who receives intense media coverage unrelated or disproportional to personal achievements. The reign of an "It girl" is usually temporary; some of the rising It girls will either become fully-fledged celebrities or their popularity will fade. The term "It boy", much less frequently used, is the male equivalent. This term is unrelated to the abbreviation IT.

Contents
 1 Clara Bow and It (1927)
2 Modern "It girls"
3 Musical
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

Clara Bow and It (1927)

Clara Bow - the original It-girlThe term was coined by English romance novelist and screenwriter Elinor Glyn in a story in Cosmopolitan magazine and subsequently used to describe actress Clara Bow as she appeared in the 1927 Hollywood silent film It. 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. "IT" can be a quality of the mind as well as a physical attraction.
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. That's "IT".
and

Personality plus, Glyn told journalists, was the "rock-bottom" definition of the word
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 even rich, blonde and well-bred to boot, but she simply hasn't got "it".

Loosely based on Glyn's novella of the same title, the movie was planned as a special showcase for the popular Paramount Studios star. Owing to Glyn's widely publicized pronouncement, the term It girl entered the cultural lexicon. Bow herself, kept the issue at arms length stating she wasn't sure what it meant .

Modern "It girls"
Since 1927, the term has been extended beyond the world of film, referring to whoever in society, fashion or the performing arts was in vogue at the time, and eventually extending beyond young female performing artists to mere "media celebrities".

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'. 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."

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 Kelly.

See also
15 minutes of fame
Celebutante
Famous for being famous

 References
1.Weedon, Alexis, 'Elinor Glyn's System of Writing', Publishing History, vol. 60. pp. 31-50 2006.
2. a b Introduction script from the movie "It" (USA, 1927)
3.The Southtown Economist, February 4, 1927
4.Waterloo Daily Courier, September 21, 1950
5. http://amanoutoftime.livejournal.com/600411.html?mode=reply
6. Brewer's Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics, 2002
7.It Girl Musical

 External links

Clara Bow, the original It girl





Scott Schuman - Garance Dore

  





Alexa Chung

  






Olivia Palermo