Twiggy

Twiggy (1949). English fashion model. Born Lesley Hornby to a lower-class British family, she became the symbol of a generation: the generation of the 1960s, young people who dressed like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the way that Mary Quant said to dress. She was working as a shampooist at a hairdresser’s shop in London, at the age of 16, when she found in the photographer Justin De Villeneuve her Pygmalion, who created her as a celebrity when she was just 18, a character who was the talk of the press and who imposed her own style as well as her own make-up: emphasized freckles and black eyebrow pencil to highlight her brows. Her friends, because of her skinny, supple physique, nicknamed her Twiggy, and that was the name under which she was named by the Daily Express as the “face of ’66.” A forerunner of the anorexic look, she was photographed by such great photographers as Avedon and Penn. Paul McCartney wrote Back in the USSR, a song that was meant to be used in the soundtrack of Twiggy in Russia, a film that was never even put into production. Ken Russell cast her in the movie The Boyfriend. In 1974-75, she played in a television series as the main character and, that same year, she recorded a single, Here I Go Again, and an LP, Twiggy. In 1997, at the age of 48, when she had already been married for years to the theatrical actor Leigh Lawson, she published Twiggy in Black and White, her biography.