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

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.”