IT Girl - Modern "It Girls"

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'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".