But the caption was something along the lines of “Why bring your girl to the club when all you want to do is go home and undress her?” Friends told me being a “Do” was what everyone wanted - bucket-list worthy, an affirmation of status and cool. The photo showed me at a party on a school night, dancing with an older boy I had been flirting with at my Toronto retail job, who put his baseball cap on my head. I remember being disgusted to find out that my photograph had been published as a Vice “Do,” and that I had no recourse to do anything about it. You stopped going to high school parties, all your friends were suddenly older than you, and you were initiated into a scene. Once a fake ID came into your possession, you took on your city under new terms: mapping out the bars and parties that were lenient, the bouncers who turned a blind eye, and the galleries who were always serving bad wine. Back then, there was a certain path for teenage girls who grew up in the major cities where being christened an It Girl was in the realm of possibility. This was the pre-social media era, when the Hilton sisters were in the society pages of People, and Leigh Lezark and Cory Kennedy were in blogs and then the culture pages of newspapers. I had a close-up view of the mechanics of what looked like effortless, accidental fame. (Not that I would identify as an It Girl if I were one: “An It Girl never calls herself an It Girl, because that would be humiliating,” write Kaitlin Gleason and Martha Fearnley, hosts of the It Girl Theory podcast.) But I spent my teenage years and early 20s among the young women being photographed by the right photographers at the right parties.

I always identified as a Party Girl, not an It Girl. “She just sits there,” artist Rita Ackermann said of Chloe Sevigny in 1994, “but she controls the whole scene. It Girls are “discovered.” There is an inevitability and myth to them, as well as a passivity.

Since the 1927 Clara Bow film It (based on the novel by Elinor Glyn) established the archetype, we have come to understand “It” as a quality possessed, not achieved.

It also illustrates the allure of the It Girl, a young woman - usually thin, white, and rich - who captures the public’s imagination in spite of her reluctance towards fame. My social experiment offers one theory for why so many present-day A-listers often seem dull. Those benefiting from natural charisma will say “absolutely not,” while people utterly lacking star quality will reliably say yes. I’ve used this parlor trick for years, and, from my accrued data, a pattern is forming. If the dinner party is reaching a lull, I suggest asking a question that has always put a little spice back into my evenings: “Have you ever wanted to be famous?” Among even the closest group of friends, the answers will shock.

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