She is the girl who has everything / Talent and beauty divine

April 28, 2023 5:04 PM

Debutantes, models, fashion writers, publicists, club kids, and assorted demimondaines: A Century of the New York "It" Girl. [article limit before paywall] This sprawling cover story, with many embedded interviews, covers 151 women who drew the camera and made the New York scene over the past 60 years. Although many of them came from money or had family connections, some of them, like Debi Mazar and Connie Girl, just showed up, worked hard, and were themselves.

Title reference to an It Girl of the 1930s: The Girl Who Has Everything.

posted by Countess Elena (14 comments total)

TIL demimondaines. beautiful word. now I'll rtfa.
posted by j_curiouser at 7:16 PM on April 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

Lisa Edelstein? Cuddy from House???
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 7:56 PM on April 28, 2023 [6 favorites]

This is a really interesting list and highly, highly New York.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 9:23 PM on April 28, 2023 [5 favorites]

Interesting choice to have more in-depth profiles for the older It Girls and then fade off the attention to detail for the newer girls, including having an obvious novice interview Alexa Chung and not bothering to even profile the 101 current-day It Girls.
posted by creatrixtiara at 10:24 PM on April 28, 2023 [3 favorites]

Let "It" free!
posted by chavenet at 2:28 AM on April 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

For anyone logging in from a non-personal computer, there is at least one NSFW-ish photo in the mix.

I read through the older section and then petered out on the newer ones, but I'm sure there is a lot interesting there, too.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:16 AM on April 29, 2023

There’s also a not-well-examine current where the women who tried this kind of thing but had money, status, and contacts to fall back on got to have 2nd snd 3rd acts, while poorer women often didn’t. Most of these It girls were Warhol Superstars but with a cushion of cash.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:22 AM on April 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

I know it was the long tail dispersion of social media that put the last nail in the coffin of "it girl"-ness but a huge factor was the way that landlords and promoters just killed high-end night life in New York for anyone with any taste or common sense.
posted by MattD at 7:13 AM on April 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

"Ava was young and slender and proud. And she had It. It, hell: she had Those."
from Dorothy Parker's Constant Reader columns in the New Yorker.
posted by winesong at 8:48 AM on April 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

I’ve been listening to Julia Fox and Niki Takesh’s podcast Forbidden Fruits on Spotify and it’s basically them interviewing their old friends and people they know from around (who are pretty famous or infamous, depending on the person), so if you are interested in the last 15 or so years of this kind of scene, it’s an interesting listen.
posted by jeweled accumulation at 9:23 AM on April 29, 2023

A bit of celebrity gossip that has managed to slip my mind a bunch of times:
Tina Chow was married to Michael Chow, a restaurateur whose father Zhou Xinfang was "one of China's most famous actors of his time and the leading figure at the Peking Opera."
posted by of strange foe at 7:47 PM on April 29, 2023

I've seen that photo of Bianca Jagger on the horse countless times and never noticed that the man leading it in was naked. I guess the photo is usually cropped?
posted by The corpse in the library at 12:30 PM on April 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

winesong: I think that's one of Dorothy Parker's best gags! Nobody reads that book anymore, and from what she says, I can see why.

MattD: you're right. In the legendary 80s scenes, you didn't have to have money to hang on in NYC. Artists could scrape by. It wasn't great, but it left people with enough time and leisure to create and throw parties.

There's no reason for me to be fascinated by this article. I am very bad at friend-have and party-go. I am allergic to scenes, even the kind built around something that interests me. If I had known who Jaime King was at the time, I probably would have hated her for being blonde and bony and admired. She was exactly my age. I didn't know, and I wouldn't have understood, how damned young that really was and how badly she was being treated in her glamorous life. A lot of these women were. Of course, some of them were just enjoying the hell out of themselves. And maybe both --
posted by Countess Elena at 1:31 PM on April 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

This was so very NYC but as someone that’s ended up in a few Cobrasnake / LNP posts I was glad to see what’s hee name from LA included as the only non actually famous one I recognized
posted by thedaniel at 11:54 PM on April 30, 2023