Who is Clara Bow? The “it girl” who inspired Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department final song

What could silent-film star Clara Bow, who has been called a “tormented Hollywood outsider,” have in common with Taylor Swift? That’s the question we’ve been asking since Swift unveiled the track list for her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, whose final song is titled “Clara Bow.”

Swift, whose 11th studio album debuted 19 April, poetically answers that question. Drawing a line between Bow’s silent-film-era stardom and the height of Stevie Nicks’s Fleetwood Mac fame, Swift then sings of the day that she will be similarly mythologized, before being replaced by the next generation’s It girl. Swift sings of the pressure that’s put on all three figures: “Take the glory, give everything / Promise to be dazzling / The crown is stained, but you’re the real queen / Flesh and blood amongst war machines / You’re the new god we’re worshipping / Promise to be dazzling.

In the final verse of the track, which was written by Swift and frequent collaborator Aaron Dessner, she breaks new lyrical ground—for the first time singing her full name in a song. Swift imagines a future in which people tell a new starlet that she resembles Swift, just as she herself has been compared to Bow and Nicks. “You look like Taylor Swift in this light, we’re loving it,” she sings. “You’ve got the edge she never did / The future’s bright, dazzling.”

The song’s cyclical theme brings to mind Swift’s Red vault track “Nothing New,” in which she and Phoebe Bridgers sing about the passage of time as it relates to their public image. “I know someday I’m gonna meet her, it’s a fever dream / The kind of radiance you only have at 17,” the two sing of their imaginary successor. “She’ll know the way and then she’ll say she got the map from me / I’ll say I’m happy for her, then I’ll cry myself to sleep.”

Before crooning about Bow and Nicks—a reference she had been hinting toward during prerelease promotion—Swift had been known to reference real-life figures in her lyrics, from tumultuous Old Hollywood couple Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in “…Ready for It?” to eccentric socialite Rebekah Harkness, who lived in the Rhode Island mansion now owned by Swift, in “The Last Great American Dynasty.”

Who was Clara Bow?
Bow grew up in “the most brutal poverty that was known at the time,” David Stenn, author of 1988’s Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild, previously told the BBC. She found a ticket out of her turbulent childhood, ruled by an abusive father and mother who was diagnosed with psychosis due to epilepsy, when she submitted her photo to a “Fame and Fortune” magazine competition in 1921 at age 16. After taking the top prize, Bow began appearing in films—making 57 movies in a decade, 46 silent and 11 talkies. “In any other era,” said Judith Mackrell, author of Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation, “she would have ended up on the streets or in a factory, but the existence of cinema as a mass industry gave her the chance to reinvent her life.”

Bow would appear in many successful films, including 1926’s Mantrap, 1927’s Wings, which became the first Oscar winner for best picture, and 1929’s The Wild Party—her first talkie. But it was 1927’s It, an adaptation of the Elinor Glyn novella in which Bow plays Betty Lou, a shopgirl who dreams of romancing her employer, that gave the star her “It girl” branding.