Who is the It Boy?
“Tisn’t beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It’s just It. Some women’ll stay in a man’s memory if they once walk down a street,” Rudyard Kipling wrote in the 1904 short story Mrs Bathurst. This is one of the earliest mentions of what would later be defined as the It Girl, a concept that then gained popularity with the silent film adaptation of the 1927 novel It by Elinor Glyn (“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”), before disseminating into culture en masse. We know who the It Girl is: she’s Edie Sedgwick, Alexa Chung, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, Chlöe Sevigny, Paris Hilton or Julia Fox, to name a few. For their most recent yesteryear issue, The Cut named 150 women in New York alone whose notoriety is synonymous with the title, and how they shaped the art, culture and nightlife scenes they were endlessly papped in over the past century. But what about the It Boy? Read more at i-D.
