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"  Most people can complain about their first apartment in New York City. Not me. At the height of the financial crash, my roommates and I hit a trifecta that even the slimiest New York real estate agent would admit is next to impossible to attain: location (on the Bowery and across the street from a Whole Foods); square footage (endless, even after dividing the living room in half to make a third bedroom); and price (two months free rent!). It was a heady time. We had an in-unit washer-dryer. Anne Hathaway lived upstairs. But after two years, in a case of all good things coming to an end, we were slapped with a rent hike so steep, I didn&amp;#039;t know whether to laugh or to cry when I opened the notice. A year after moving out, I found myself at a birthday party at the restaurant just beneath my former apartment building. I couldn&amp;#039;t resist peering into my old bedroom window (floor-to-ceiling and south-facing, natch), theorizing about the person lucky enough to live there now\u2014not to mention loaded enough to cough up its astronomical rent. Was it some downtown-leaning CEO? An exiled royal from one of those hard-to-recall countries like Andorra? In fact, it was an It Girl. I know this because a few months later, I got a call from a friend who&amp;#039;d had a serious case of d\u00E9j\u00E0 vu upon visiting the home of Man Repeller blogger Leandra Medine. When I inquired about Medine&amp;#039;s roommate situation, he added insult to injury. &amp;quot;Where your living room was? That&amp;#039;s her foyer.&amp;quot; Since launching her blog in 2010, Medine has parlayed a genuinely original, jolie laide philosophy of dressing\u2014outr\u00E9 harem pants, armloads of bangles, boxy blazers\u2014into a mini empire, with a readership of 29,000 daily &amp;quot;uniques&amp;quot;; a social media following in the hundred thousands; collaborations with megabrands Superga and Uniqlo; styling gigs; TV gigs; consulting gigs; and the kind of fans who leave feedback like: &amp;quot;OMFG You just replied to me! I can&amp;#039;t breathe ahhhhhh!!! You just made my day, week, month, year, LIFE! OMFG!&amp;quot; As little as five years ago, being an It Girl was not considered a rainmaking profession\u2014indeed, it wasn&amp;#039;t considered a profession at all. It was something more ephemeral, not to mention rare. But this age of personal branding (i.e., self-promotion), street-style photography, and 24-7 image consumption on countless blogs has given rise to a new breed of woman for whom maintaining &amp;quot;It&amp;quot; is a lucrative, coveted, full-time\u2014and, frankly, exhausting-sounding\u2014job. Who hasn&amp;#039;t memorized their faces, puzzled over their stylistic nuances, clicked to buy their shoe/bag/lipstick? Olivia, Dree, Solange, Harley; all those Russians (Miroslava, Dasha, Ulyana); and of course the winsome Brit Alexa Chung. The thing is: If It is by definition singular, what happens when It is everywhere? We&amp;#039;ll soon find out. This month sees the debut of the latest addition from the Medine machine, Man Repeller: Seeking Love. Finding Overalls. (Grand Central), a sort of extended version of the 24-year-old&amp;#039;s blog, with chapters like &amp;quot;The Maxi Dress&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;The Period Panties.&amp;quot; Chung will also have a book out later this fall, titled, well, It\u2014a collection of personal photos and thoughts on what it means to be in possession of It, interspersed with a fair amount of quirky non sequiturs such as, &amp;quot;I like dinosaurs like a nine year old boy likes dinosaurs. I&amp;#039;m not quite sure why but I just love them.&amp;quot; Not so long ago, it was refreshing to see attention swerve from ubiquitous Hollywood style to that of real(ish) women\u2014the ones who were out there wearing bold, directional clothes and doing it exceedingly well, all without the help of professional stylists (of course, many of them were professional stylists, but whatever). But the danger of calling so much attention to one&amp;#039;s It-ness is that people might start to question it. They might begin to wonder, for example, whether a look can be considered &amp;quot;natural&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;effortless&amp;quot;\u2014surely the two sartorial bywords of our day\u2014when it clearly requires considerable man-hours to assemble. And, more to the point, when much of the clothing in question has been gifted, not purchased, from brands eager to have an It&amp;#039;s endorsement\u2014these days, a coup as valuable as a celeb appearance (and one for which labels often pay). &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m dreading fashion week,&amp;quot; declared one editor friend last February. &amp;quot;I just want to do my job, but it&amp;#039;s become this whole parade.&amp;quot; This from an exceedingly well-dressed woman, mind you, a fashion veteran whose restrained, low-key chic I&amp;#039;ve long admired. Still, it&amp;#039;s no match for the mixed prints and neon shoes and professionally, perpetually undone hair of the Its who get held up outside fashion week tents by an ever-growing swarm of photographers. These days, to walk through that crowd and not be photographed is akin to an insult. Cue the backlash: Earlier this year, International Herald Tribune fashion editor Suzy Menkes wrote an article titled &amp;quot;The Circus of Fashion,&amp;quot; about the street-style phenomenon. &amp;quot;Judging fashion has become all about me,&amp;quot; wrote Menkes. &amp;quot;Look at me wearing the dress! Look at these shoes I have found! Look at me loving this outfit in 15 different images!&amp;quot; For the record, I&amp;#039;m not immune to the power of It. I&amp;#039;m the proud owner of a mod minidress from Kate Moss&amp;#039;s first collection for Topshop. I&amp;#039;ve been known to cut pictures of Palermo out of Us Weekly to use as a reference for a blow-out (how does she get that perfect curl?). Even while typing this, I realized I was wearing a mohair cardigan from Chung&amp;#039;s blockbuster collection for Madewell. These women have the special sauce. On some level I can&amp;#039;t resist the notion that if I study them hard enough, instead of almost getting it right every morning but juuust missing the mark, I too will have It. This, minus the millennial accoutrements, is a conceit as old as fashion itself. The term It was first used by Rudyard Kipling in the 1904 short story &amp;quot;Mrs. Bathurst,&amp;quot; about a young widow whose exceptional magnetic quality defied description. &amp;quot;&amp;#039;Tisn&amp;#039;t beauty, so to speak. Nor good talk necessarily,&amp;quot; wrote Kipling. &amp;quot;It just is it.&amp;quot; Two decades later, writer Elinor Glyn expanded on Kipling&amp;#039;s concept in her 1927 book, It (which was spun off into a silent film starring Clara Bow, an It Girl of her day). Glyn, like Kipling, wasn&amp;#039;t able to pinpoint what exactly it was, but she knew precisely what it wasn&amp;#039;t: &amp;quot;Conceit,&amp;quot; she said pointedly, destroyed &amp;quot;It.&amp;quot; In 1998, in a now infamous celebrity PR overreach, a fresh-faced Gretchen Mol, whose raw talent and Old Hollywood beauty seemed destined for the A-list, appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair with the line, &amp;quot;Is She Hollywood&amp;#039;s Next It Girl?&amp;quot; Mol&amp;#039;s next film tanked; her career, though successful, never quite lived up to that line. Later, she reflected on the fallout of that two-letter word: &amp;quot;It suddenly felt very, &amp;#039;Hey, she&amp;#039;s not all that.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; In her book, Chung generously doles out her trade secrets. &amp;quot;Blow-dry your hair with a round brush,&amp;quot; she instructs, &amp;quot;then at the last minute add a sprinkling of surf spray and water to it and massage the roots to get I-don&amp;#039;t-give-a-fuck bed head.&amp;quot; Also: &amp;quot;Line the inside of your eyes with black pencil, then blink really hard a few times in a row. So it looks like you&amp;#039;ve lived in it for a day.&amp;quot; Innocuous enough stuff, but in demystifying It\u2014in pulling back the curtain just an inch too far\u2014is she doing herself and her ilk a disservice? Perhaps it&amp;#039;s naive to think that it&amp;#039;s new for Its to be calculating, to have a bit of salesmanship in their showmanship. In a now iconic 1994 New Yorker story about Chlo\u00EB Sevigny, then a 19-year-old East Village scenester with an impossible- to-name cool factor, writer Jay McInerney remarked: &amp;quot;This seeming indifference to marketing herself may be her most attractive quality,&amp;quot; before quickly adding, &amp;quot;It may also be canny.&amp;quot; And after spending time at the Factory, the artist Robert Rauschenberg concluded that &amp;#039;60s It Edie Sedgwick&amp;#039;s entire persona was a piece of performance art. &amp;quot;I mean, she was an object that had been very strongly, effectively created,&amp;quot; he said at the time. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s like Garbo putting on her glasses and saying I vant to be left alone,&amp;quot; says Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of the Museum at FIT. &amp;quot;If you want to be left alone, but everyone&amp;#039;s following you, isn&amp;#039;t that kind of the same thing?&amp;quot; The paradox isn&amp;#039;t lost on Chung. Toward the end of It, she offers: &amp;quot;This morning I tweeted about spilling coffee onto my lap. This is boring and I blame Twitter. Where will this all end up? Will we completely lose our ability to be private, respectful, subtle?&amp;quot; Maybe, but it could afford you a really, really great apartment. Click here to see a look back at It Girls from Clara Bow to Jane Birkin Here, 5 It Girls of the moment "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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