From It Girl to That Girl

What girls around, comes around

THEY were the blueprint.

Much like there is a slayer born unto every generation, there is a girling of every generation, a template from which all other girls will seek to emulate. However time glugs on, we can consistently expect the girlification of each season’s reaping of young girls — usually between the ages of post-menses onset and pre-ma’am — a certain archetype prevails as… That Girl.

When I was a young girl, in the days before social media and when the Internet was pre-Google, just Myspace and Geocities, It Girls were all over magazines. And magazines were like the FYP and Explore pages of social media, but instead of tapping an app, you had to wait every month for it to arrive at your door. The most IT It Girl was Alexa Chung, who even penned a book about it, appropriately titled It. It was a perfect tome of her Itness and the Itness of all the It Girls, in that it was amusing, aesthetic, made little sense, and explained nothing. You’re not meant to understand what It was. And if you thought you did, no you don’t.

The It Girls of the early aughts were crowned as such by magazines and nightlife photographers. What these girls possessed was hard to put one’s finger on, but you could just tell that they had something — chiefly, they were nice to look at. That something, also, was never an aspiration to be an It Girl, rather they became such by implicitly or unwittingly fitting into some modern glamorous archetype. They were seen among the right (read: cool) crowds, in the right (read: exclusive) places, and in the right (read: expensive) clothes. A lot of them came from wealth, rebelling against their uptight upbringings, making it easier to fulfill those big three. My Tumblr days are over, but I remember consistently hearting images of Alexa Chung, Leigh Lezark, Lou Dillon, Mary-Kate Olsen, Ashley Olsen, Chloë Sevigny, Daisy Lowe, Sienna Miller (largely thanks to portraying one of the original It Girls, Edie Sedgwick in a movie)… I’m sure I’m forgetting a handful, but that’s a long enough list of thin white women for now.

It Girls were living life, they were fun incarnate, they were romance in motion. They had nicely rumpled hair that naturally just did that with no heat-styling or perming (allegedly). They had cigarettes and black coffee for breakfast. They applied the perfect smoky eye makeup by sleeping in eyeliner, and never washed their makeup off before bed but somehow had blemish-free skin. They love vintage fashion (What Goes Around Comes Around, not Goodwill). They often dated musicians. It was more a lifestyle than a strict aesthetic.

A Goodreads review of Alexa Chung’s It

But even It Girls grow up! Twenty-something years later, the It Girls have evolved. The blueprint has been disseminated globally via social media — an equalizer in that anyone can build a “platform” with commitment to content and performance, and also an unequalizer in that engagement metrics can span the margins between the followeds and the followeds-not so vastly as to create a glamorous enough disassociation that a celebrity is born. Kind of like how stars are formed from hot gas under gravity’s immense pressure. I guess you could say influencers are today’s It Girls, and that would seem like the natural progression — no one knows what any of them really “do” even if they understand how to mimic their habits. Influencers (successful ones) are able to deftly exploit most aspects of their bodies, hobbies, relationships, and lifestyles for the sake of content. It Girls thrive in the nebulous balance between mystery and moodboard.

What we have now instead is That Girl. While the It Girl’s essence was defined by her glamorized hedonism and vices, That Girl is like a post-rehab It Girl. That Girl is self-care incarnate, waking up early, writing in her 5-minute gratitude journal, smoothie-ing, meditating, exercising, eating healthfully. Her skincare routine is considered self-care, not vanity. Her makeup doesn’t look like she’s wearing makeup, so much as good grooming, purposefully clean. She’d rather be in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 than Page Six. She is a talented multi-tasker, a product of pathologized success in the face of an uncertain economy and information overload. But still, there’s an optimism and hopefulness That Girl demonstrates by individual willpower and mantras of determination by way of TikTok soundbites.

This is why acrylics are helpful. @Reddit

TikTok gives That Girl the kind of blueprint that It Girls never had because there’s a platform to perform one’s Thatness. Also, it’s important to note that any girl can be That Girl simply by participating in That Girl behavior, whereas It Girls were deemed It by editorial authorities cultivating a kind of demo they wished to appeal to. That’s why most It Girls, when asked about their Itness, have no idea what you’re talking about.

I don’t know really what to make of all this it-ness and that-ness, observed from my well-worn mid-30s perch. One of the big reliefs of aging is that youth-oriented trends matter less. But they’re still interesting to me. I think regarding either It Girls or That Girl as a byproduct of vapidity and narcissism is to overlook what we are constantly seeking in one another. Women, girls are always a mirror for one another (for better or worse, in sickness and in wellness). Our most common ambitions often involve a desire to become one another, not to dominate but emulate. And it’s fun to be a part of something, to feel connected to a community, sometimes, until it isn’t.

I’ve spent so much of my youth trying to be unique and individual, which was really a rejection of what I thought I was supposed to be. And even those aspirations were informed by observing other women around me. Declining the invitations that come for a body that reads as Girl keeps a light on for the others who hit snooze three times on an alarm set to 10 AM, who willfully consume delicious foods they know they are mildly allergic to because pleasure is always a risk that bears repeating, who think Miu Miu is a sound a cat makes, and whose hairstyle has never once been described as French.

Those of us who are neither It nor That and never have been, continue doing our little habits and hobbies, in the hazy, urgentless bliss between negotiating what it is to be unique and what it is to be beloved, until we grow out of the drive for either and settle into… whatever awaits the girls who become women freed from vague adjectives. A wise one once said, The girls who get it, get it; and the girls who don’t, don’t.