Twiggy

Biography

Dame Lesley Lawson (née Hornby; born 19 September 1949), widely known by the nickname Twiggy, is an English model, actress, and singer. She was a British cultural icon and a prominent teenage model during the Swinging Sixties in London. Twiggy was initially known for her thin build and androgynous appearance, considered to result from her big eyes, long eyelashes, and short hair. She was named "The Face of 1966" by the Daily Express and voted British Woman of the Year. By 1967, her fame had spread worldwide and she had modelled in France, Japan, and the US, and appeared on the covers of Vogue and The Tatler. After modelling, Twiggy had a successful career as a screen, stage, and television actress. Her role in The Boy Friend (1971) earned her two Golden Globe Awards. In 1983, she made her Broadway debut in the musical My One and Only, for which she received a Tony nomination for Best Actress in a Musical. She later hosted her own series, Twiggy's People, in which she interviewed celebrities, and appeared as a judge on the reality show America's Next Top Model. Her 1998 autobiography Twiggy in Black and White entered the best-seller lists. From 2005 onwards, she modelled for Marks and Spencer, appearing in television advertisements and print media. Twiggy has been credited for the company's successful revival at that time.

== Early life == Lesley Hornby was born on 19 September 1949 and raised in Neasden (originally in Middlesex, now a suburb of north-west London). She was the third daughter of Nellie Lydia (née Reeman), a factory worker for a printing firm, and William Norman Hornby, a carpenter and joiner from Lancashire. Their first daughter, Shirley, had been born 15 years earlier; their second, Vivien, had been born 7 years earlier. According to Twiggy, her maternal grandfather was Jewish. However, her mother's genealogy, which was examined on the series Who Do You Think You Are? in 2014, does not contain Jewish ancestry. Twiggy's mother taught her to sew from an early age. She used this skill to make her own clothing. She attended the Brondesbury and Kilburn High School.

== Modelling career (1965–1970) ==

=== 1965–1967 === Twiggy is one of the first international supermodels and a fashion icon of the 1960s. Her greatest influence is Jean Shrimpton, whom Twiggy considers to be the world's first supermodel. She has said she based her "look" on Pattie Boyd. Twiggy herself has been described as the successor to Shrimpton. In January 1966, aged 16, she had her hair coloured and cut short in London by Leonard of Leonard of Mayfair. The hair stylist was looking for models on whom to try out his new crop haircut and he styled her hair in preparation for a few test head shots. A professional photographer Barry Lategan took several photos for Leonard, which the hairdresser hung in his salon. Deirdre McSharry, a fashion journalist from the Daily Express, saw the images and asked to meet the young girl.

McSharry arranged to have more photos taken. A few weeks later, the publication featured an article and images of Hornby, declaring her "The Face of '66". In it, the copy read: "The Cockney kid with a face to launch a thousand shapes... and she's only 16". Hornby's career quickly took off. She was short for a model at 5 ft 6 in (1.68 m), weighed six point five stone (41 kg; 91 lb) and had a 31–23–32 (79–58–81 cm) figure, "with a new kind of streamlined, androgynous sex appeal". Her hairdresser boyfriend, Nigel Davies, became her manager, changed his name to Justin de Villeneuve, and persuaded her to change her name to Twiggy (from "Twigs", her childhood nickname). De Villeneuve credits himself for Twiggy's discovery and her modelling success, and his version of events is often quoted in other biographies. In her 1998 book Twiggy In Black and White, she says that she met Justin through his brother, when she worked as a Saturday girl at a hairdressers in London. This is where she began to see the models in the magazines, but never thought she could do something like that. Jean Shrimpton was her idol, so she grew her hair long to look like her, before having to have it cut off for her headshots by Barry Lategan. Ten years her senior, De Villeneuve managed her lucrative career for seven years, overseeing her finances and enterprises during her heyday as a model. One month after the Daily Express article, Twiggy posed for her first shoot for Vogue. Since then she has appeared on the cover of Vogue (and numerous international editions) 14 times.

=== 1967–1970 === Twiggy was soon seen in all the leading fashion magazines, commanding fees of £80 an hour, bringing out her own line of clothes called "Twiggy Dresses" in 1967, and taking the fashion world by storm. "I hated what I looked like," she said once, "so I thought everyone had gone stark raving mad." Twiggy's look centred on three qualities: her stick-thin figure, a boyishly short haircut and strikingly dark eyelashes. Her signature look was achieved in part by applying three layers of false eyelashes. Twiggy arrived in New York City in March 1967 at Kennedy Airport, an event covered by the press. The New Yorker, Life and Newsweek reported on the Twiggy "phenomenon" in 1967, with the New Yorker devoting nearly 100 pages to the subject. An editorial in the edition of 15 March of Vogue described her as an "extravaganza that makes the look of the sixties". Twiggy was, according to feminist critic Linda Delibero, "the most visible commodity Britain produced that year, and [America] generously complied with the hype, scarfing up skinny little Twiggy pens, Twiggy lunch boxes, Twiggy lashes, an assortment of Twiggy-endorsed cosmetics". That year she became an international sensation, modelling in France, Japan and America, and landing the cover of Paris Vogue in May, the cover of US Vogue three times, in April, July and November, and the cover of British Vogue in October. Twiggy has been photographed by such noted photographers as Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon, Melvin Sokolsky, Ronald Traeger, Bert Stern, Norman Parkinson, Annie Leibovitz and Steven Meisel. On 10 December 1969, despite being 20 years old, Twiggy was selected as the subject for one of the first editions produced by Thames Television of the television series This Is Your Life.

=== Reception === Twiggy and the magazines featuring her image polarised critics from the start. Her boyishly thin appearance was criticised by some for promoting an unhealthy body ideal for women. Fashion correspondent Su Dalgleish of the Daily Mail said that "Twiggy came along at a time when teen-age spending power was never greater. With that underdeveloped, boyish figure, she is an idol to the 14- and 15-year-old kids. She makes virtue of all the terrible things of gawky, miserable adolescence." The Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2009 catalogue for its exhibition The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion noted that "Twiggy's adolescent physique was the perfect frame for the androgynous styles that began to emerge in the 1960s." During Twiggy's March 1967 visit to New York, Women's Wear Daily characterised the intense publicity surrounding her, describing her as a "Paper Girl" manufactured by the fashion industry. At a reception in her honor, Diana Vreeland, editor-in-chief of Vogue remarked, "She has beautiful bones. She will age well," while designer Bill Blass said she represented "our infatuation with youth." Former Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick quipped, "Twiggy copied me two years ago." Some prominent photographers also rejected Twiggy's look: Irving Penn refused to photograph her, while David Bailey, Terence Donovan, and Brian Duffy reportedly boycotted her. In the 10 April 1967 edition of Newsweek, opinions on Twiggy remained sharply divided. Mark Cohen, president of Leeds Women's Shop in Boston, called her "the most obnoxious thing that ever came on the horizon," adding, "Her legs remind me of two painted worms." By contrast, Vreeland remained one of her strongest supporters, stating, "She's no flash in the pan. She is the mini-girl in the mini-era. She's delicious looking. I love Twiggy and intend to use her in the future." Nancy White, editor-in-chief of Harper's Bazaar, similarly endorsed her, stating, "I'm all for Twiggy. She's youth and freshness. We all need a lift and she's come along to give it to us." In recent years, Twiggy has spoken out against the trend of waif-thin models, explaining that her own thin weight as a teenager was natural: "I was very skinny, but that was just my natural build. I always ate sensibly – being thin was in my genes."

== Acting and music career ==