The Enduring Myth of the It Girl

The mystique behind icons like Kim Kardashian and Marilyn Monroe comes from the parts of American culture we prefer not to look at too closely.

Kim Kardashian is lying on a hotel bed in a cleavage-baring robe, eating salad with her hands. The camera zooms in, following her fingers as she picks up two pieces of lettuce and a limp strip of grilled chicken and places them between her glossy lips. Next, a slice of apple, dripping with something viscous. She drops a tomato on the bed and gazes off to the side, maybe guilty about the mess but still sultry. Suddenly, the camera cuts to a high-ceilinged hallway, where Kardashian struts toward the camera, salad in hand. Then we see her in a bubble bath, blowing soap off her fingers. The screen fades to white, and the Carl’s Jr. logo appears in the center.

This advertisement, promoting a new Carl’s Jr. salad, aired in 2009. After it ran, the fast-food company’s CEO said in an interview that Kardashian was originally supposed to be filmed eating a burger, but “she wasn’t good at it.” Asked whether she truly lacked the ability to eat a hamburger skillfully (read: sexily), a spokesperson claimed that she wanted the camera to catch her as she “eats something that tied in more with her brand.” Whichever story is true, Kardashian still ended up making money by eating one of the restaurant’s lowest-calorie menu options and showing off her small physique.

Kardashian has made her physical form, and the various body-modification processes it takes to perfect it, a central aspect of her brand since she first hit the Hollywood scene. In 2009, she released a DVD workout series entitled “Fit in Your Jeans by Friday,” and since then she has served as a spokesperson or brand ambassador for waist trainers (contemporary corsets), the weight-loss-supplement company QuickTrim, laxative teas, and appetite-suppressant lollipops. Mere months ago, she launched a skincare line. The current centerpiece of her business empire is a line of spandex items called SKIMS Solutionwear, a name that implies the customer’s natural form is a problem to be solved.

Kardashian has risen from either cultural laughingstock or revenge-porn victim (depending on your political leanings) to an It Girl who models on the cover of Vogue, walks the Met Gala red carpet, and has been called the ultimate “modern muse” and the woman who “reinvented the socialite.” Many Americans first met Kim Kardashian on Paris Hilton’s reality show, where Kardashian appeared as her stylist and assistant. Like many an aspiring It Girl before her, she saw someone followed by cameras and shrieks and set out to steal her spot. Hilton’s relationship with her public was one of performative distance; the point of watching her was that she was nothing like the rest of us—so unrelatable, in fact, that her television show was predicated on the obvious and ostensibly comedic anachronism of Hilton temporarily living with a “normal” American family. But where Hilton was playing for laughs, Kardashian was playing to win, so she shattered the trick mirror Hilton had placed between her fiction and her reality and let us into her life. Kardashian replaced the paparazzi with her own selfie cameras and ring lights and a hired crew, and eventually she created a video game in which all of us could compete for her crown, attempting to rise from where she started—the “E-list,” in the game’s parlance—to where she is now enthroned: the “A-list.”

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The phrase “It Girl” was popularized by the 1927 Clara Bow film It, based on a novella of the same name by Elinor Glyn. In the original text, “It” is a “strange magnetism which attracts both sexes” and can be possessed by both men and women. In the novella, subtitled “Romance of a Little Sister of the Rich,” a down-and-out aristocrat is forced to accept a new-money mogul’s sexual advances because she needs the cash. Despite her condescension toward “vulgar business millionaires,” she is no match for his magnetic It factor, his “mystery, and of course raw physical allure.” On his part, the man scoffs at her resistance, confident “this woman should belong to him.” The origin of the term hinges on classism, misogyny, the objectification of a woman, and a man who importantly is not an It, but has It. The person with It wasn’t considered an object themselves until that person was a woman.

From the moment the concept became popular, the It Girl was used to sell products.

In the film version, a sassy shopgirl has a crush on a scion of the empire of the “world’s largest store.” He’s already engaged to an aristocratic blonde, but old money is no match for It, and Bow’s character ends up marrying into a fortune. The movie broke all existing box office records, and Bow herself was anointed an It Girl by a national magazine. From the moment the concept became popular, the It Girl was used to sell products. According to Vincent Barnett and Alexis Weedon’s history of Glyn’s novel and the film, “individuals with It were often used to promote fashion designs” and other consumer goods, with Bow being one of the first.

In the wake of the film’s wild success, studios set up entire departments devoted to pegging products to their It actresses. Bow herself was featured in window displays and on billboards for products promising to bestow her It factor via purchase. This department, explicitly called the “Exploitation Department,” created a class of perma-consumers. Because of the curated mystery around what “It” was, no single product could create it, leaving consumers in an endless search for the perfect cocktail. Exploiting their It Girls as much as those girls’ fans, the studios raked in revenue.

In a series of photos taken by Richard Avedon in 1958, another It Girl posed as a series of her It Girl older sisters, from Jean Harlow to Clara Bow herself. As Clara, she wears a glistening bloodred flapper dress and dramatically opens a bottle of champagne, legs splayed and eyes wide as she stands atop a table, clearly mid-carousing. The model in these photos is Marilyn Monroe, an It Girl who Clara herself anointed as her successor in multiple letters to newspapers before her death.

Like Bow, Monroe rose to fame as a charismatic sex symbol on the silver screen and had a series of high-profile romances with famous men. But as a ’50s It Girl, Monroe was subject to far more media scrutiny. In response, she delivered an ideal It Girl performance, spilling sound bites alternately flirtatious and flippant and giving just enough away in interviews to keep us wondering what she was hiding. Her physicality—the petite hourglass form, buoyant blonde curls, bashful eyes, and big lips—became an ideal many American women strove to achieve.

While almost every American is familiar with the photo of Monroe with her hands at her crotch while she poses over a subway grate, far fewer are familiar with her radical politics, the fact that she was an outspoken proponent of the Civil Rights movement and an alternate delegate in her state’s Democratic caucus. The phrase “It Girl” objectifies the woman with the very prose formation that purports to elevate her; by becoming an icon, she stops being a person and too often finds herself ending up a mannequin. Stuck in a window display-cum-fishbowl, an It Girl’s complexity calcifies, and as a society, we usually only remember them for their looks and how badly we wanted them.

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Now, almost a hundred years after Clara Bow hit our screens, we have Kim Kardashian. From her family’s reality show to her unprecedented rate of posting on all social media platforms, Kardashian broke all preexisting rules of being an It Girl simply by following them too well. Since the phrase’s inception, It Girls have been followed obsessively by the media, rendering the experience one of constant surveillance, revealing just enough information to keep us wanting more and willing to pay to get it. With this unprecedented level of access, the mystery disappeared, and we were left with what we asked for, which is the last thing anyone wants to get. Over the course of her heavily documented rise to stardom, Kardashian’s own cameras accidentally caught the levers of classism, racism, and misogyny that elevate an It Girl in action. The mystique behind the It Girl, it turns out, is simply an amalgamation of the aspects of American culture we prefer not to look at too closely.

But Kardashian showed us exactly how she finally made her way past the gates of the Met. She replaced the sparkling, new-money taste she had embraced in the aughts with pared-down, subtler displays of wealth associated with the Waspy American elite. As one fashion writer put it in Elle, the “squeaky-shiny” accoutrements were swapped out for a “stealth wealth” palette, openly embracing the classism that infuses beauty standards.

Similarly, Kardashian never shies away from her desire to be extraordinarily, unhealthily thin. In one episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, one of her worried younger sisters confronts Kardashian about how little she’s been eating and tells her she’s afraid that Kardashian has anorexia. Kardashian responds with giddy glee: “Oh my God, thank you!” she exclaims, before begging her siblings to tell her more. Kardashian’s willingness to pull back the curtain has also unveiled the disturbing racial dynamics underlying the shifting It Girl aesthetics. Where Paris Hilton personified the waifish look associated with a lineage of figures from Clara Bow to Edie Sedgwick, Kardashian is incredibly thin while also earning nicknames inspired by her world-famous ass and capitalizing off Black female aesthetics.

From wearing cornrows and calling them “Bo Derek Braids,” through their ever-fluctuating skin tones, to their short-lived embrace of the Brazilian Butt Lift look, the Kardashians have repeatedly treated Black female aesthetics as trends to be adopted and rejected when their popularity wanes. Throughout, the Kardashians put a premium on thinness, giving interview after interview on their diet and exercise regimens, publishing diet books, and working with weight-loss companies. Instead of draping the It factor in mystery, Kardashian makes clear what it takes to be on top: whiteness, thinness, and the ability to pay huge amounts of money to change your body. In response, America downloads her video game, likes her pictures, and spends hundreds of millions on SKIMS.

Kim Kardashian makes clear what it takes to be on top: the ability to pay huge amounts of money to change your body.

The It Girl has evolved from a specifically classed and racialized figure to, as one movie reviewer put it, a “type that almost everyone wants to be, to be like, or at least pay to see.” This transformation obscured the classism and racism inherent to the It Girl concept while simultaneously mystifying its requirements. By making “It” into some indefinable trait, arbiters of culture can avoid admitting what it actually is, which, in most cases, is a perfect storm of racial and class positioning and a willingness to engage in self-harm in exchange for public adoration.

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When photos of Kim Kardashian wearing Marilyn Monroe’s famed “naked dress” at the Met Gala hit the internet, individuals and news outlets expressed outrage and awe in equal measure.

The next day, Kardashian told Vogue that she decided to wear the dress after asking herself what the most American outfit in history was. Clearly, the answer was a slinky number that simulated nudity, worn with a wink by an iconic sex symbol and It Girl of yore. Kardashian confessed that she had held an erroneous assumption shared by many Americans—that Marilyn was “curvy”—so when she tried the dress on for the first time she was shocked to the point of tears to find it didn’t fit. Kardashian told Vogue and Allure, among other outlets, about the extreme diet she used to lose sixteen pounds in mere weeks. When asked about the message this might send to young women, Kardashian said she wasn’t “starving” and “had a nutritionist,” while also admitting that the extremity of her diet caused a flare-up of psoriatic arthritis. What’s more American than a girl brought to the brink of despair by her own body, who then embarks on a strict regimen of diet and exercise, successfully shrinks herself, fits into the dress, and then pridefully regales a national woman’s magazine with the whole sordid story?

Kardashian’s walk up the Met steps in the dress incited an instance of another, more modern American tradition: that of vitriolic online debate over whether she was tarnishing or burnishing Marilyn’s legacy, an argument that quickly devolved into a debate over whether Kim Kardashian is our generation’s Marilyn Monroe. The fact that this debate occurred at all reveals more about American attitudes around women in the public eye, beauty standards, and class than anything else.

Working in film during the studio era, Monroe was often played like a chess piece by the men who employed her. Kardashian might appear far more independent than It Girls past, the protagonist of a show about her own life and the CEO of her own company, but she still functions as a mouthpiece for insidious messages about womanhood. Perhaps Kardashian’s misconception about Monroe’s body came from one of the memes that periodically surface online, which involve photos of Monroe in a bathing suit alongside text claiming that Marilyn’s body was bigger than the female bodies we consider ideal today, or one of the plethora of ostensibly feminist tweets claiming that Marilyn wore a size twelve, opining about a desire to return to that supposedly less-body-fascist era for women.

But Monroe also told magazines about her daily diet, and her stated regimen was as strict as Kardashian’s, and as Kardashian’s story reveals, she was also extremely small. In the same moment when body positivity has taken up more media space than ever before, Kardashian—a woman once congratulated for expanding body ideals herself—is devoting her career to “helping” women appear slimmer. She seems to think that proving her It Girl status is contingent on fitting into the same tiny dress someone even smaller than her wore decades ago.

The American tendency to romanticize our past has met liberal myths around the ascendance of body positivity. Tens of news articles and thousands of tweets are deployed to debate whether Kardashian “deserves” to be anointed our generation’s Marilyn Monroe, proving we still care too much about the It Girl crown. It Girls attract feminist derision and reclamation in equal measure: there is a constant stream of takes on Kardashian as, alternately, a woman misogynistically mistreated by the press, a woman complicit in the oppression of other women, a girlboss redefining gender constructs, and a fountainhead of body dysmorphia and eating disorders in vulnerable youths. Similarly, opinions on Monroe’s feminist legacy run the gamut from Gloria Steinem’s contention that feminism could have saved her life to Jacqueline Rose’s conception of Monroe as a feminist icon akin to Rosa Luxemburg. Why do we care so much? Why do we still seem to believe there’s only room for one girl on the pedestal, and a girl who can’t be too heavy at that?

Shortly after Kardashian walked the Met Gala carpet in Marilyn’s dress, E! published an article on the “It Girl Starter Pack.” The piece listed twenty-three products that are apparently must-haves for wannabe It Girls. Where once the It Girl sold products, she has now become an amalgamation of products, and her crown was purchased for her by her public’s views, likes, and purchasing power. Whether the media is obsessing over the It Girl’s transformation, replacement, or death, they’re still obsessing over her, an activity which only ever serves to elevate the racist and misogynistic ideals of femininity that power the beauty and weight-loss industries.

On last month’s cover of Allure magazine, Kardashian sits naked on a mirrored pedestal. The profile opens with Kardashian telling the journalist that she should get Botox. When asked whether she ever worries about promoting a potentially toxic beauty standard, Kardashian announces, “If I’m doing it, it’s attainable,” and she describes both a recent extreme diet and the necessity of a nine-step skincare routine. Our culture inculcates us with the belief that the less physical space we take up, the more space we’ll be given on a cultural stage. Ultimately, until we dethrone the notion of the It Girl, generations of women will still be trying to fit into the same impossibly small dress.