Is that it?
Petronella Wyatt
Are we finally seeing the last gasp of the so-called It Girl? Is this the moment that we have all been waiting for? The end of the oversexed, overpaid and over-every-peer young woman who has dominated the higher echelons of 'celebrity' culture since the 1990s? Preening, boasting, pompously speaking of non-existent achievements and unable to maintain any relationship — except with a Prada handbag.
The other day the worst of them all, Lady Victoria Hervey, who possessed all the modern It Girl's facile credentials — a stint as a PR girl, a not very super model, a gossip columnist and a failed boutique owner — was voted off Channel Five's 'reality' television programme, The Farm, after only ten days. Now she announces, in all seriousness, that she is leaving for Hollywood where she hopes to become the 'new Kate Winslet' — only posher. Thank heaven, there goes another one.
One wonders where these women get their sense of humour. Only Tara PalmerTomkinson had enough wit and balance to send herself up. Indeed, Tara was the only one of the bunch to enhance Our lives, with self-deprecating accounts of her behaviour and a genuine talent for the piano. As for the other It Girls I have known, their appearances on charity committees and their adherence to the party (the nonpolitical kind) induced them to behave like Nobel Prize winners. Finally, to paraphrase P.G. Wodehouse in The Mating Season, all of them seemed obliged to go out with a restaurateur called Mogens.
I cannot quite remember when the It Girl was thrust upon us, but I think it dates from a Taller cover in the late 1980s or early 1990s. I hasten to add that I recall this Taller issue because I was in it — though not as an It Girl. But on the cover were five or six women, including the then weather girl Tania Bryer. Then came Tamara Beckwith with the Denis Healey eyebrows, and Normandie Keith, an American who is now married to the late Sir Gordon White's son.
But what was an It Girl in the first place? This is a debatable sociological point. According to a book by the publishers of the Oxford Dictionary, the phrase 'it-girl' appeared in 1986. Yet surely it is much older than that. The Twenties actress Clara Bow was the first well-known woman to be described as an It Girl, because she had 'it', a euphemism for sex appeal. A little later, Lana Turner was the Sweater Girl, because of her embonpoint, and Anne Sheridan the 'oomph' girl.
But during the subsequent decades 'It Girl' acquired a different meaning. It was not enough to be Sexy and wild; elegance and a brain became requisite, too. Thus women like Anita Loos, Dorothy Parker, Babe Paley and Mary McCarthy possessed more of 'it' than mere actresses and models. Plum Sykes, the Brit who moved to New York, is alleged by some to be a proper It Girl because she has written a 'way we live now book', called Bergdorf Blondes. Yet when I was in New York last week, everything Miss Sykes wrote appeared either to be imaginative or no longer in vogue. Miss Sykes writes about Brazilian bikini waxes, where the hair is waxed off into a tiny strip, compulsory French manicures, impossibly impeccable grooming and regular appointments at Bergdorf Goodman for hair colouring.
Funny. The only girl I've met with a French manicure is a friend of mine who is a lesbian. No one confessed to having a Brazilian wax, I saw no one in an evening gown at a buffet dinner and my hostess told me Bergdorfs was passe. So are America's It Girls, the Hilton sisters, who are receiving a derisory press. Perhaps it is the war, perhaps America is more interested in Bush and Kerry and the deficit than a surfeit of silly young exhibitionists. But Lady Victoria Hervey will find that her career in the US will be about as successful as it was here. That is, not very.
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