From Neasden to the newspapers
Twiggy was born Lesley Hornby in September 1949 and grew up in Neasden, in north-west London. She was a teenager still at school when she began modelling, and she was by most accounts naturally very slim, which is how she got her nickname. Her boyfriend and early manager, Nigel Davies, who used the professional name Justin de Villeneuve, helped to bring her to the attention of the hairdresser Leonard, who cut her hair short and photographed her with the stylist Barry Lategan.
In early 1966, the Daily Express newspaper ran a feature that named her “the face of 1966”. The label was not the invention of one headline writer alone, but the publicity gave her national exposure. Within months she was in demand for magazines and advertising campaigns. The following year, the style she embodied was being copied by teenagers across Britain.
The look
Twiggy’s appearance was distinctive and easy to describe. She had a short, cropped hairstyle, heavy eye make-up with emphasised lower lashes, wide eyes and a very slender, boyish figure. Her clothes were typically simple, short and geometric: mini dresses, tights, flat or low shoes and unfussy shapes. This fitted well with the mod fashion that had grown out of London’s youth culture and was now being sold by boutiques on Carnaby Street and the King’s Road. Designers such as Mary Quant had popularised the miniskirt, and the model Jean Shrimpton had already shown the new, youthful fashion to a wide audience in earlier years.
Twiggy was different from the polished, grown-up models who dominated earlier fashion. Her image was young, cheerful and accessible, and for many teenage girls she seemed a more reachable ideal than the elegant mannequins of the 1950s. Cheap versions of her style, such as short dresses, eye make-up and wigs, were widely sold, which helped it spread beyond the fashion pages.
The American visit
In 1967 Twiggy travelled to the United States, in what was widely treated as a significant publicity trip. She was met by large numbers of reporters and photographers, and American magazines and newspapers took a close interest. According to accounts of the trip, she was asked about her diet, her thinness and her views on fashion, and the questions often seemed to puzzle her, since she said she simply ate normally and was naturally slight. She also appeared at promotional events and in the fashion press, and the visit helped to establish her as an international star rather than a British novelty.
Her fame in America showed how British youth style had become an export. It came alongside the success of British music, and the pairing of music and fashion made London seem, to American observers, a centre of modern taste. Merchandise followed, including, reportedly, a doll bearing her name, a sign of her commercial reach. The phrase “swinging London” was widely used in the American press that year, though British commentators often found it exaggerated.
A debate about bodies
Twiggy’s rise also prompted a debate that has continued ever since. Critics at the time and later commentators argued that the very thin ideal she was taken to represent put pressure on young women to diet. Others pointed out that Twiggy herself did not claim to promote any particular lifestyle, and that she described her figure as natural. It is difficult to say how much her image changed behaviour, and the evidence of the time is mostly anecdotal. It is fair to say that the fashion industry of the 1960s favoured a narrower and younger ideal than before, and that she became its best-known face. Modern readers should also remember that a single model rarely causes a trend alone; photographers, designers, magazines and consumers all play a part.
A quick career, then reinvention
Modelling at that level was short-lived, and Twiggy herself stepped back from it at about the end of the decade. She turned to acting and singing, and she appeared in the 1971 film The Boy Friend, directed by Ken Russell, and in theatre and television in later years. She became, in later decades, a familiar figure in British public life, often as a spokesperson for fashion brands and as a television personality.
Why the image lasted
The Twiggy look has remained a shorthand for the mid-1960s, much as the later hippie fashion came to stand for the Summer of Love. Both were real, but both were also partial: most people in 1967 did not dress like a fashion model or a hippie, and both styles were as much a product of publicity as of everyday habit. The two trends also overlapped. While Twiggy represented the sleek, short-skirted end of London style, the London underground scene was moving toward flowing, colourful and second-hand clothes. Together they show a year in which fashion was shifting quickly, and in which the legacy of 1967 can be traced in clothing as clearly as in music or politics.