Dame
Lesley Lawson DBE (née Hornby; born 19 September
1949) is an English model, actress, and singer, widely known by the
nickname Twiggy. 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 the 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, she had modelled in France,
Japan, and the US, and had landed on the covers of Vogue and The Tatler. Her fame had spread worldwide. After
modelling, Twiggy enjoyed a successful career as a screen, stage, and
television actress. Her role in The Boy Friend (1971)
brought her two Golden Globe Awards. In
1983 she made her Broadway debut in the musical My One and Only, for
which she earned a Tony nomination
for Best Actress
in a Musical. She later hosted her own series, Twiggy's
People, in which she interviewed celebrities; she also 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. Since 2005, she has modelled for Marks and Spencer, most recently to promote their recent
rebranding, appearing in television advertisements and print media,
alongside Myleene Klass, Erin O'Connor, Lily Cole, and others. In 2012, she worked alongside Marks
& Spencer's designers to launch an exclusive clothing collection for the
M&S Woman range. esley 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 master
carpenter and joiner from Lancashire: Their first daughter, Shirley, had
been born fifteen years earlier; their second, Vivien, had been born seven
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. Twiggy's great-great-grandmother, Grace Meadows, died
in a stampede of excitable shoppers at a bargain sale at Messrs McIllroys store
on Mare Street, in Hackney, in 1897. This event made the news at the time. Twiggy
is best remembered as 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 at Leonard of Mayfair, owned
by celebrity hairdresser Leonard. 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
eight stone (51 kg;
110 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. 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. One month after the Daily Express article, Twiggy posed for her first
shoot for Vogue. A year later, she had appeared in 13 separate
fashion shoots in international Vogue editions. Twiggy arrived in New York 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." 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. In 1967, an editorial on page 63 of 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". The Metropolitan Museum of Art's
2009 catalogue for its exhibition The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion stated: Twiggy's
adolescent physique was the perfect frame for the androgynous styles that began
to emerge in the 1960s. The trend was manifested in a number of templates:
sweet A-line dresses with collars and neckties, suits and dresses that took
their details from military uniforms, or, in the case of Yves Saint Laurent, an
explicit transposition of the male tuxedo to women. Simultaneously, under the
rubric of "unisex", designs that were minimalistic, including Nehru
suits and space-agey jumpsuits, were proposed by designers such as Pierre Cardin and Andre Courreges, and, most famously in the United States,
by Rudi Gernreich. 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.