Lose weight. Have money. Give away money. Hire a publicist, even if it bankrupts your daddy. The no-bake recipe for becoming an icon of the 2000s is laid out in the opening salvo of Queenmaker: The Making of an It Girl, Zackary Drucker’s fizzy documentary about the founding daughters of a social revolution.
It girls, armed with appurtenances both flashy and furry, have swarmed the earth since the creation of capital. But privacy used to be a cornerstone of privilege, and the gilded-age dictum held that the names of respectable ladies were only to appear in the newspaper when they were born, married or died. Drucker’s film chronicles the precise moment when a multitude of women of means dared to court the public’s attention. Which isn’t to say it was an entirely empowering development.
