Dame Lesley Lawson

 (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 in swinging sixties London.

Twiggy was initially known for her thin build (thus her nickname) and the androgynous appearance considered to result from her big eyes, long eyelashes, and short hair.[1][2] She was named "The Face of 1966" by the Daily Express[3] and voted British Woman of the Year.[4] 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.[4] 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.[3] 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.[5] In 2012, she worked alongside Marks & Spencer's designers to launch an exclusive clothing collection for the M&S Woman range.[6]

Lesley Hornby was born on 19 September 1949 and raised in Neasden (then 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:[7] Their first daughter, Shirley, had been born fifteen years earlier; their second, Vivien, had been born seven years earlier.[5] According to Twiggy, her maternal grandfather was Jewish.[8] However, her mother's genealogy, which was examined on the series Who Do You Think You Are? in 2014, does not contain Jewish ancestry.[9]
Twiggy's mother taught her to sew from an early age. She used this skill to make her own clothing.[10] 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.[11]

Twiggy married American actor Michael Witney in 1977. Their daughter, Carly, was born in 1978.[12] They remained married until his death in 1983 from a heart attack.[13]
She met Leigh Lawson in 1984.[3] In 1988, they worked on the film Madame Sousatzka and married that year in Sag Harbor, New York (on Long Island). Lawson adopted Twiggy's daughter, who took his surname. The couple resides in London[14] and owns a home in Southwold, Suffolk.[15]
On Twiggy's official website, she states she is a supporter of breast cancer research, animal welfare, and anti-fur campaigns.[3] She was one of the celebrities, including Tom Hiddleston, Jo Brand, E. L. James, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Rachel Riley, to design and sign her own card for the UK-based charity Thomas Coram Foundation for Children. The campaign was launched by crafting company Stampin' Up! UK, and the cards were auctioned off on eBay during May 2014.[16]

1965–1967Edit

Twiggy is best remembered as one of the first international supermodels and a fashion icon of the 1960s.[17] Her greatest influence is Jean Shrimpton,[18][19][20] whom Twiggy considers to be the world's first supermodel.[19] She has said she based her "look" on Pattie Boyd.[21] Twiggy herself has been described as the successor to Shrimpton.[1][22][23][24]
In January 1966, aged 16, she had her hair coloured and cut short in London at Leonard of Mayfair,[25] owned by celebrity hairdresser Leonard.[26] 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.[27] 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.[28]
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".[17][29] In it, the copy read: "The Cockney kid with a face to launch a thousand shapes... and she's only 16".[30]
Hornby's career quickly took off.[29] She was short for a model at 5'6" (167 cm), weighed eight stone (51 kg; 112 lbs) and had a 31-23-32 figure, "with a new kind of streamlined, androgynous sex appeal"[31] 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).[32] 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.[27][33] 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,[34] and taking the fashion world by storm.[35] "I hated what I looked like," she said once, "so I thought everyone had gone stark raving mad."[29] Twiggy's look centred on three qualities: her stick-thin figure, a boyishly short haircut[5] and strikingly dark eyelashes.[36] Describing how she obtained her prominent eyelashes, now known as Twiggy's, she said, "Back then I was layering three pairs of false eyelashes over my own and would paint extra 'twigs' on my skin underneath."[37]

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.[citation needed]

1967–1970

Twiggy arrived in New York in March 1967 at Kennedy Airport, an event covered by the press.[38] The New Yorker,  Life and Newsweek reported on the Twiggy "phenomenon" in 1967, with the New Yorker devoting nearly 100 pages to the subject."[27][39] That year she became an international sensation, modelling in France, Japan and America,[4] and landing the cover of Paris Vogue in May,[40] the cover of US Vogue three times, in April, July and November, and the cover of British Vogue in October.[36] 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".[41]
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.[42]

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.[35]

Twiggy and the magazines featuring her image polarised critics from the start. Her boyishly thin image was, and still is, criticised promoting an "unhealthy" body ideal for women.[43][44] "Twiggy came along at a time when teen-age spending power was never greater," said Su Dalgleish, fashion correspondent for the Daily Mail. "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."[45] At the height of her fame, Mark Cohen, president of Leeds Women's shop, had an even harsher view: "Her legs remind me of two painted worms." Yet Twiggy had her supporters. Diana Vreeland of Vogue stated, "She's no flash in the pan. She is the mini-girl in the mini-era. She's delicious looking."[45] 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."[46]
On 10 December 1969, despite being 20 years old, she was selected as the subject for one of the first editions produced by Thames Television of the television series This Is Your Life.[47]