Revisiting Clara Bow, the Scrutinized “It Girl” Who Inspired Taylor Swift’s New Song

What might silent-film star Clara Bow, who has been known as a “tormented Hollywood outsider,” have in widespread with Taylor Swift? That’s the query we’ve been asking since Swift unveiled the observe listing for her newest album, The Tortured Poets Division, whose ultimate tune is titled “Clara Bow.”

Swift, whose eleventh studio album debuted April 19, poetically solutions that query. Drawing a line between Bow’s silent-film-era stardom and the peak of Stevie Nicks’s Fleetwood Mac fame, Swift then sings of the day that she shall be equally mythologized, earlier than being changed by the subsequent technology’s It woman. Swift sings of the stress that’s placed on all three figures: “Take the glory, give all the things / Promise to be dazzling / The crown is stained, however you’re the actual queen / Flesh and blood amongst warfare machines / You’re the brand new god we’re worshipping / Promise to be dazzling.”

Within the ultimate verse of the observe, which was written by Swift and frequent collaborator Aaron Dessner, she breaks new lyrical floor—for the primary time singing her full identify in a tune. Swift imagines a future through which individuals inform a brand new starlet that she resembles Swift, simply as she herself has been in comparison with Bow and Nicks. “You appear like Taylor Swift on this mild, we’re loving it,” she sings. “You’ve bought the sting she by no means did / The long run’s vivid, dazzling.”

The tune’s cyclical theme brings to thoughts Swift’s Pink vault observe “Nothing New,” through which she and Phoebe Bridgers sing concerning the passage of time because it pertains to their public picture. “I do know sometime I’m gonna meet her, it’s a fever dream / The type of radiance you solely have at 17,” the 2 sing of their imaginary successor. “She’ll understand how after which she’ll say she bought the map from me / I’ll say I’m completely satisfied for her, then I’ll cry myself to sleep.”

Earlier than crooning about Bow and Nicks—a reference she had been hinting towards throughout prerelease promotion—Swift had been recognized to reference real-life figures in her lyrics, from tumultuous Outdated Hollywood couple Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in “…Prepared for It?” to eccentric socialite Rebekah Harkness, who lived within the Rhode Island mansion now owned by Swift, in “The Final Nice American Dynasty.”

Her connection to the Brooklyn-born Bow, although, takes a little bit of parsing to grasp. Bow grew up in “essentially the most brutal poverty that was recognized on the time,” David Stenn, writer of 1988’s Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild, beforehand instructed the BBC. She discovered a ticket out of her turbulent childhood, dominated by an abusive father and mom who was recognized with psychosis because of epilepsy, when she submitted her photograph to a “Fame and Fortune” journal competitors in 1921 at age 16. After taking the highest prize, Bow started showing in movies—making 57 motion pictures in a decade, 46 silent and 11 talkies. “In another period,” mentioned Judith Mackrell, writer of Flappers: Six Girls of a Harmful Era, “she would have ended up on the streets or in a manufacturing unit, however the existence of cinema as a mass business gave her the prospect to reinvent her life.”

Bow would seem in lots of profitable movies, together with 1926’s Mantrap, 1927’s Wings, which grew to become the primary Oscar winner for finest image, and 1929’s The Wild Occasion—her first talkie. Nevertheless it was 1927’s It, an adaptation of the Elinor Glyn novella through which Bow performs Betty Lou, a shopgirl who goals of romancing her employer, that gave the star her “It woman” branding.

“She was the primary American intercourse image,” Stenn mentioned, per The Washington Submit. “Girls needed to be her, and males needed to be along with her. She had a heat and vulnerability that was interesting to everybody.” Bow cultivated what some could now name a parasocial relationship along with her most ardent followers. “She actually got here alive in entrance of the digicam,” Mackrell instructed the BBC. “Once you watch her, you are feeling as if she’s doing one thing very spontaneous for you, so that you’re having a relationship along with her. Which may be an phantasm, but it surely’s a really highly effective one.”