the it girl issue

How Do You Know Which Girl Has ‘It’?

A behind-the-scenes conversation about making our latest Yesteryear issue.

Our art department during the making of this issue. Photo: Hugo Yu
Our art department during the making of this issue. Photo: Hugo Yu

Since 2011, New York has celebrated its anniversary by exploring a slice of New York City’s history in our Yesteryear issue. This year, we decided to look back at the city’s insatiable appetite for — and indispensable supply of — “It” girls. If you’ve ever wondered how these ideas are born and what goes into making a sprawling package like this one, we’re publishing a special peek into just that for our subscribers, with a conversation between Cut editor-in-chief Lindsay PeoplesNew York deputy editor Alexis Swerdloff, and features writer Matthew Schneier.

Lindsay Peoples: I loved this old New York Magazine cover story of Olivia Palermo and Tinsley Mortimer. The cover line was “America’s Last Top Socialite,” and I remember thinking about the idea of an “It” girl, that fleeting moment in time for these women, and we were talking about different themes for the Yesteryear issue — so I brought it to an ideas meeting.

Alexis Swerdloff: I remember everyone in the meeting, we were all like, Yes, publish. And on the walk back to your office after the meeting, Lindsay, we were chatting — what happened to so-and-so and what happened to her — and there were just so many people that time had mildly forgotten that we were curious about. And of course there were classic “It” girls that everyone knows about, like Chloë Sevigny or Marisa Berenson, so we felt it could be this great mix of very famous people sprinkled in with all these less-remembered people. But then it became, Okay, now that we’re doing this, what even is an “It” girl, and who counts? So, Matthew, that’s when we sent you on a journey.

Matthew Schneier: Yeah, “It” girl — it’s like “chic,” one of these words that everybody feels instinctively they have a sense of, but, you know, what it precisely means and who gets to decide is extremely subjective. I think for everyone, when you say “It” girl, just like floods of women start pouring into your brain. It’s like a Pavlovian response. It turned out to be one of those nerves that you touch where everybody has really strong opinions they didn’t even know they had about who is an “It” girl and who isn’t. We had a lot of near-fights with one another about who counted and who didn’t.

Cover Story

A Century of the
New York ‘It’ Girl

More on the New York ‘It’ Girl 

Lindsay: I love the polarizing opinions of who is and who isn’t.

Matthew: And then getting to look into the history of the idea was great, and it turned out this was sort of propitious timing because the term “It” girl is just about 100 years old, in the way that we use it now. And what I found really interesting and sort of became a through-line in my piece was that it’s always been mediated in large part by magazines or newspapers; the serialized story that essentially codified the term, and then led to the film that popularized it nationwide, ran serially in Cosmopolitan in the ’20s. And then ever since, you know, writers from Life to Vogue to Vanity Fair to New York Magazine have been crowning and chronicling them and their exploits. So it felt like a perfect magazine story.

Alexis: I think in the beginning, we were like, Oh, this is gonna be just like a fun little romp through time. And as we sort of started reading all these old articles, and talking to these women, it was clear this was not all fun and games for everyone involved. Being in implies the possibility of being out. And for many of these women, it was actually sort of traumatic to be celebrated and then, often, stuck in that moment or forgotten about. Obviously, there are the famous examples of how being an “It” girl could lead to something very tragic, like Edie Sedgwick. But there were also those people whose experiences have been less written about — like Lisa Edelstein or Jaime King. And that actually made it a lot more interesting.

Lindsay: I always loved Carolyn Bessette and would look at photos of her on Pinterest and Tumblr, but then you’d read about her and how much she struggled and how much pressure it was for her. That was one of the things that also made this not feel so surface-level. Their stories had a lot of layers.

Alexis: Once we settled on our list, we set out to find lots of these former “It” girls to participate, which was its own crazy process because some people have publicists and some do not, and it was a lot of like Instagram DMing and getting in touch with friends of friends to track some of these women down.

Matthew: Some of them didn’t want to be tracked down. There was one “It” girl we were dying to talk to who, it turns out, is now working for the government in Iowa. Alexis managed to find her, and sent a lot of impassioned emails. She decided not to participate, which we respect, so we’re maintaining her privacy, but if she’s reading, we would love to come back to her for round two.

Alexis: Once we had a good working list, we set out lots of writers and reporters to profile and talk to these women. And as soon as that started happening, the other editors and I (Joy Shan and Mariam Aldhahi, among others) got so excited because the stories were amazing. Like finding out that Jenny Shimizu is a mechanic and that Ananda Lewis’s true love is carpentry … A lot of these people haven’t been interviewed about this era of their lives in a while, and I think they were just very excited to talk about it. We decided to do some interesting pairings, like Alissa Bennett with Jaime King, who had modeled together, or Annie Hamilton interviewing Alexa Chung, whom she had a burner Instagram account devoted to. Shawn McCreesh had lunch at the Grill with Lizzie Grubman (here’s proof that it happened), Bridget Read profiled the original Warhol superstar Baby Jane Holzer, and Brock Colyar spent a very long evening in Greenpoint with Cory Kennedy, who really hadn’t spoken to the press in a very long time. Rachel Handler did a fascinating as-told-to with Chloë Sevigny — who apparently only agreed to talk to Jay McInerney for The New Yorker because he promised to buy her a Helmut Lang dress!?

Matthew: A rubber Helmut Lang dress, Jay told me — though he says he doesn’t remember this promise.

Lindsay: My favorite interview was Chloë Sevigny because she is the quintessential “It” girl to me and someone who is still very cool and in but doesn’t try too hard, which is why we love her. A lot of my personal favorite “It” girls aren’t as approachable or in touch with culture as Chloë is, so it’s nice to look at her career from this lens.

Alexis: I think for Yesteryear issues in the past, we haven’t really dwelled in the late ’90s and aughts too much, but we really spent some time in those eras, which was so fun. So many of the stories from that era, actually, were so surprisingly fascinating, from the Sykes sisters (one of my favorite interviews) to Cory, to Bonnie Morrison, who wrote this amazing piece about having sort of accidentally stumbled into being a “social.” We really weren’t going to touch the current “It” girls, but we had this idea about “It”-girl inflation that happened in the mid-aughts, and on the day before the magazine close, when we were looking at the entire issue spread out on the table down in the art department, we thought, You know, you do kind of miss seeing the current crop of “It” girls. So in the span of less than 48 hours, we reached into the depths of our delirious brains and brought together many people in the office and came up with that last spread. At one point on Friday night when the issue was hours away from closing, Matthew and I came up with the “important hair” caption next to Hope Atherton — which still makes me chuckle. The point wasn’t to make it definitive or completeist, rather to gather enough “It” girls to get across the concept of the flood of them.

Matthew: If people hadn’t made memes of the green M&M or the rat czar in our “It”-girl spread and complained that we missed them, I think we would have failed.

Alexis: I’ve been really dreaming of “It” girls, and it was hard to turn it off in my brain. I thought of a new one in the shower the other day, and was like, It’s okay, we can cover them another time.

Matthew: I texted you one yesterday who had been eating at me. How do I turn this thing off?

Lindsay: We made it just “It” Girls of New York. I’m sure if we would have expanded it, we would be thinking of “It” girls for centuries to come.

How Do You Know Which Girl Has ‘It’?