Who is Clara Bow? The ‘It Girl’ who inspired Taylor Swift’s new song

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

Swift, whose eleventh studio album debuted on 19 April, 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 will likely be equally mythologized earlier than being changed by the subsequent technology’s It Lady. Swift sings of the strain that’s placed on all three figures: “Take the glory, give all the pieces / Promise to be dazzling / The crown is stained, however you’re the true queen / Flesh and blood amongst struggle machines / You’re the brand new god we’re worshipping / Promise to be dazzling.”

Within the ultimate verse of the monitor, which was written by Swift and frequent collaborator Aaron Dessner, she breaks new lyrical floor – for the primary time singing her full title in a tune. Swift imagines a future during 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 received the sting she by no means did / The long run’s brilliant, dazzling.”

The tune’s cyclical theme brings to thoughts Swift’s Crimson vault monitor “Nothing New,” during which she and Phoebe Bridgers sing in regards to 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 form of radiance you solely have at 17,” the 2 sing of their imaginary successor. “She’ll understand how after which she’ll say she received the map from me / I’ll say I’m pleased for her, then I’ll cry myself to sleep.”

Earlier than crooning about Bow and Nicks – a reference she had been hinting toward throughout prerelease promotion – Swift had been identified to reference real-life figures in her lyrics, from tumultuous Previous 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.

Who was Clara Bow?

Bow grew up in “essentially the most brutal poverty that was identified 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 as a result of epilepsy, when she submitted her picture to a “Fame and Fortune” journal competitors in 1921 at age 16.

After taking the highest prize, Bow started showing in movies – making 57 films in a decade, 46 silent and 11 talkies. “In every other period,” mentioned Judith Mackrell, writer of Flappers: Six Girls of a Harmful Technology, “she would have ended up on the streets or in a manufacturing unit, however the existence of cinema as a mass trade gave her the possibility to reinvent her life.”