Interview
Twiggy: 'I don't think high fashion will ever move
completely away from slimness'
Emine Saner
As a model,
she was the face of the 60s, and went on to have a busy acting career. She
discusses her new podcast, and life in swinging London
Emine Saner
@eminesaner
Published
onTue 12 May 2020 06.00 BST
So enduring
is that image of Twiggy – side-swept hair, heavy eyes, delicate neck – that
it’s strange to think she was a model for only four years.
But Twiggy
is an expert at reinvention (or “branching out” as her joke goes). The
schoolgirl known as Lesley Hornby became Twiggy, the face of the 1960s,
recognised then and now by a single name. At 21, she became the all-singing,
all-dancing star of Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Boy Friend, which won her two
Golden Globes. She has performed on Broadway, recorded albums and been a TV
presenter. In her 60s, she turned fashion designer, with several collections
for Marks & Spencer. Last year, she was given a damehood.
What can be
next? Podcasts, of course. At 70, she is about to launch Tea With Twiggy, in
which she will interview famous friends including Joanna Lumley, Elaine Paige
and Christopher Biggins “about their careers, their pasts, their childhoods,
and things they’re doing at the moment”, she says. The lockdown has been an
opportune moment to get started on it. “There are so many horrible stories on
the news,” she says. “I wanted people who could tell lovely stories and be
funny.”
I speak to
Twiggy by phone; she’s in the flat she shares with her husband, the actor and
director Leigh Lawson. She is missing her family the most during lockdown – her
daughter had a baby in February, Twiggy’s fifth grandchild (her stepson has
three). “I got to hold him the day he was born, then I got to visit about four
days later,” she says. “And then by March …” We all know what happened next.
She video calls her grandchildren, and sends them the recordings she and her
husband make of them reading stories. “Apart from that, we’re lucky, we’ve got
each other, Leigh and I,” she says.
She is a
good talker and generous with her laughter – until a question displeases her.
But you don’t, I suppose, survive for more than five decades in the public eye
by being a pushover.
It’s
remarkable she never lost the plot after all these years in the spotlight. “I
was so straight it’s boring,” she says, and laughs. It was the late 60s when
she was launched into international fame, but she insists she never took drugs.
“The worst thing I did was smoke cigarettes.” She didn’t even drink wine until
she was in her late 20s. “I didn’t like it. I grew up in Neasden, we drank
tea.”
Twiggy was
the youngest of three daughters. She remembers a happy childhood , although one
where her mother, Nell, would occasionally be admitted, sometimes for months at
a time, to a psychiatric hospital. “I think today [she would have been]
diagnosed as bipolar,” says Twiggy. “I had the most amazing dad, Norman, who I
loved and adored. He was from Lancashire, very sensible, very down to earth,
very calm. So when Mum … I think anyone with bipolar, they’re not ill all the
time, they can go months or even years being absolutely fine and then something
happens that makes them plummet into depression. But my dad was there.” Her
sister Shirley, who was 15 years older than her, would also step in, “so I was
very protected really. It wasn’t until I grew up and looked back and thought it
must have been really hard on Dad.”
Twiggy was
close to her mother. “I wouldn’t go anywhere without my mum. It’s amazing what
happened to me because I was so shy and insecure.” She says she “never even
thought” of becoming a performer. But she loved fashion and had pictures of the
model Jean Shrimpton on her bedroom walls “along with the Beatles”, so had
vague ambitions to become a model or fashion designer.
Her sister,
Vivien, was seven years older, “and I can still remember in detail clothes she
made and really wanting to be like her”. Twiggy was a mod and was allowed out
to a club in Harrow on Saturday nights as long as she was home by 10.30pm.
“We’d look at all the other mods and see what they were wearing and then try to
copy that. I used to make a lot of the stuff. That was the huge influence on
me, fashion-wise. Then, by the mid-60s, just before I was discovered, people
like Barbara Hulanicki gave us Biba.” The boutique for young women in
Kensington “became my obsession. Because before that, you could either buy
clothes from children’s shops or you could buy women’s clothes from department
stores.”
Twiggy
wasn’t allowed to wear makeup, but at the weekends she and her friends would
practise doing their faces. She made her eyes look like the ones painted on her
rag doll, just playing around, but it became her look. “It used to take me an
hour and a half to do, I had three pairs of false eyelashes on the top. I’m
amazed I could open my eyes.” She laughs. “Then I used to paint the lines
underneath. So in 1966, when I was plucked from anonymity into the madness it
became, that was my look.”
She was
discovered when a newspaper fashion journalist came across some photographs of
her modelling a new cropped hairstyle for a celebrity hairdressers’. “Within a
month, I was all over the newspapers, I was getting offers to go to Paris. I
can’t say I didn’t like it. I loved it, it was brilliant.” The following year
she went to New York, and became even more famous. “Sonny and Cher gave me a
party in Hollywood,” she recalls. She remembers being searched at the airport
for drugs. “I think they figured that anyone from swinging London must be …”
She doesn’t finish the sentence. “But you know, it’s probably why I survived,
because I was so straight.”
The fashion
world, like others, has been rocked by allegations of sexual assault in the
wake of the #MeToo movement. Twiggy has said before that she never experienced
any harassment, partly because she had a manager, Justin de Villeneuve (an art
dealer and photographer who changed his name from Nigel), who travelled
everywhere with her. ““My dad had worked in the film industry, so he obviously
saw things that went on. And he said: ‘If you’re going to go to these studios
and travel, you have to have somebody with you.’ So I was never ever hit upon.”
A lot of the women who experienced the worst of it were trying to make their
way into the industry and were more vulnerable, she points out – Twiggy had
already very definitely made it.
De
Villeneuve was also Twiggy’s boyfriend. They had met when she was 15 and he was
25. Does she look back and feel that was exploitative? “It’s not an area I
cover so you can look it up in books if you want,” she says. “I don’t talk
about that.” In her 1997 autobiography, she writes: “Looking back he should
never have taken me out, I was far too young and he was far too old.”
She also
writes that it has irritated her that over the years the story has been that
“Justin was the Svengali and I was the dumb blond”. Instead of being the
delicate, naive person her appearance back then would have you believe, she was
steely. There is a clip of an interview with her from 1970. Responding to an
inane question about a curvier shape being back in fashion, she replies,
cool-eyed: “The bosom has never been out. That would mean that women have been
out, which is ridiculous, isn’t it?” She also said she was “very bored” with
modelling.
“I didn’t suddenly
stop one day and think: ‘I’m not going to model any more,’” she says now. But
by then she had met Ken Russell, the film director. She went along to lunch
with him – it was an informal audition – and when she turned up, Paul McCartney
was also sitting at the table. “Every teenage girl had a favourite Beatle and
mine was Paul McCartney,” she says. “Three years before, I’d been one of the
screaming girls at one of his concerts. I had to go and sit at this lunch,
opposite the most famous film director in England and my idol and try and be
normal and interesting.”
Russell,
she says, “became like my mentor”. She would go to his house and watch old
musicals with him and his wife, Shirley. He cast her as the star of The Boy
Friend, an extravagant musical, for which Twiggy had singing and dancing
lessons for a year. It’s an extraordinary first film to do. “I’d have been a
bit of a fool to turn it down,” she says. She would win two Golden Globes for
the part and later, one of her co-stars, Tommy Tune, would cast her in his 1983
Broadway production. “At least with a film, I was not frightened of cameras, I
had worked in the modelling industry for four years. But to go out on a
Broadway stage in front of 2,000 people every night and sing and dance, that’s
scary.” It was, however, “the greatest professional thing I’ve ever done
because it proved to me that I could do something that I thought I couldn’t.”
Did she
have a plan for her career? “No. I don’t think you can. You can have a goal of
what you want to do, but you can’t plan it because you’ve got to be offered
parts.” Twiggy was certainly well-connected – there are great stories in her
autobiography about meeting Fred Astaire, and running away from Phil Spector’s
house. She worked with David Bowie and attended Hollywood parties with
Elizabeth Taylor. Although she worked fairly steadily throughout the 80s and
90s, she never quite reached the heights of her early career. “I did a couple
of films that were duds, everyone does. But I think I’ve had a brilliant
career. And more importantly I’ve had a very happy life.”
The closest
there has been to Twiggy, in terms of exposure and era-defining influence, has
been Kate Moss (they are friends). Both have been blamed in their time for
pushing an aesthetic of extreme thinness. It’s not fair to single out the model
– it’s the industry in which they work that is at fault – but how does she feel
about the conversations around body image now? Does the fashion industry still need
to change and focus more on different shapes? “Well, it has, hasn’t it, there
are so many more ads now,” she says. “It’s the same with older models, they’re
using middle-aged and older women in commercials. I don’t think the high
fashion industry will ever go completely away from slimness but I think other
parts of the industry have started to use different shapes and sizes, and I
think they should.” Her range for M&S, she points out, went from a size
eight to a 22.
In 2009, an
advert for an eye cream, featuring Twiggy, was banned by the Advertising
Standards Authority for being misleading because it had been airbrushed. “That
was nothing to do with me. I can’t stop people …” She trails off. “I go and do
a job. If they take it away and do the stuff, it’s absolutely nothing to do
with me.” There’s a growing number of younger women, I say – I’m thinking of
the actor Jameela Jamil – who refuse on principle to be airbrushed, because of
the unrealistic messages it sends women. “I have no idea, it’s up to them. I
don’t have any control over that,” says Twiggy, sounding increasingly prickly.
We go back and forth a bit. Does she mind that she is airbrushed? There is a
pause. “I think we should get off this subject because you’re getting really
boring,” she says.
So I ask
her what she wants to do next, though the atmosphere doesn’t really recover.
She was about to go into the studio to record a new album, which she wants to
get back to at some point. She still loves fashion design and has been doing
more knitting and sewing during these lockdown days, much like in her teenage
years. “I wonder what she would say to her 16-year-old self now. “Oh, just go
for it. And enjoy it. I think I did most of the time. I don’t look back and
think ‘I wish I hadn’t done that’.”
• Twiggy’s
podcast is Tea with Twiggy; she is on Instagram @TwiggyLawson
Is the Fashion Industry creating new mental and
physical slavery ? Actually Killing People ?
The Vogue
Factor, by Kirstie Clements, former editor of Australian Vogue
She was
fired in May 2012 after 25 years at the magazine
Samantha
Cameron watches painfully-thin Chloe Memisevic walk for Erdem at London Fashion
Week Fall/Winter 2011, left, and former
Australian Vogue editor Kirstie Clements, right
Clements
says models eat tissues to stay full and starve themselves for days
JOAN SMITH
Thursday 4 April 2013 in The Independent / http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-vogue-factor-fashion-really-isnt-worth-dying-for-8560194.html
The Vogue Factor: Fashion really isn’t worth
dying for
The damage
the industry inflicts on young women is paraded on the catwalk
Imagine a
factory where the employees are regularly being starved.
Some are so
desperate with hunger that they pick up tissues from the floor and stuff them
into their mouths, while a few become so weak that they have to be admitted to
hospital and put on a drip. Any industry which treated workers so badly would
be targeted by undercover reporters. Photographs of emaciated workers would
cause an outcry, questions would be asked in parliament and the factory would
be closed down. This would happen anywhere in the developed world with one
glaring exception, and that’s the fashion industry.
“You know
how you read interviews where models insist that they eat a lot? Not true,”
says Kirstie Clements, who edited Vogue Australia for 13 years. “The only way
they can get that thin is to stop eating. They eat tissue paper to stave off
the hunger pangs – literally ball it up and eat it.” It’s one of several
startling claims in The Vogue Factor, a book that Clements has written about
the industry she knows from the inside, and it’s not even the most shocking.
Clements
lifts the lid on the existence of “fit” models, the women used to check the fit
of clothes who are expected to be even thinner than the catwalk variety. “Fit”
in this instance means just the opposite, as Clements discovered when she asked
a top model how she was getting on with her flatmate. “Oh, it’s fine,” was the
insouciant reply, “she’s a fit model so she is mostly in hospital on a drip.”
By any
normal standards, someone whose job puts them in hospital most of the time is:
(a) deluded; and (b) abused. But the fashion industry departed from normal
standards years ago, not even bothering to hide the damage it inflicts mostly
(but not exclusively) on young women. It’s paraded on catwalks and in fashion
spreads for anyone to see, evident in models whose jutting hipbones and stick
limbs suggest they’re suffering from malnutrition. When flipping through a
glossy magazine a couple of days ago, I was mesmerised by a perfume ad
featuring two models whose naked bodies were as skinny as saplings.
Clements
recalls a fashion shoot which lasted for three days yet she didn’t see the
model eat once, even when the girl got so weak that she could hardly stand or
open her eyes. Everyone involved in the fashion industry is expected to buy
into a fantasy in which there’s nothing unusual about being five foot nine and
weighing 45 kilos. But the death toll on the international modelling circuit –
Ana Carolina Reston, Luisel Ramos and her sister Eliana, Isabelle Caro – tells
a different story. Fashion isn’t worth dying for, so let’s start applying the
normal health and safety standards to this sick industry.
The Vogue Factor, by Kirstie Clements, former editor
of Australian Vogue
Clements
says models eat tissues to stay full and starve themselves for days
She was
fired in May 2012 after 25 years at the magazine
By MARTHA
DE LACEY in The Daily Mail.
PUBLISHED:,
2 April 2013 / http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2302957/The-Vogue-Factor-Sacked-Australian-Vogue-editor-Kirstie-Clements-writes-books-fashion-industry-claiming-models-starve-eat-tissues-stay-full.html
For those
who puzzle over how supermodels stay so whippet thin, a former Vogue editor has
lifted the lid on the horrific lengths some go to to maintain their wispy
waistlines and cut-glass hipbones.
Kirstie
Clements, sensationally fired from her role as editor of Australian Vogue last
May, has written a tell-all book about the fashion industry, claiming some
models eat tissue paper to feel full, starve themselves for days on end, spend
frequent stints on hospital drips, and are often so weak with hunger they
struggle to keep their eyes open.
As reported
by Georgia Graham in the International Business Times, The Vogue Factor also
explains that within the fashion world there is 'thin', and then there is
'Paris thin' - a term that describes the size of a model who has starved their
already fragile body down two dress sizes in order to be cast in big oversea
shows.
In her
controversial tome, Clements says she once spent three days on a shoot with a
model who didn't see her eat a single meal - and that on the final day she
could barely stand or keep her eyes open.
She also
reveals how an Russian model once told her that her flat mate was a 'fit' model
- a model whose body is used by top designers for clothes-fittings - and
therefore spent lots of time on a drip.
Clements
spent 25 years at Australian Vogue - her book's subhead is 'from front desk to
editor' - and steered the ship for 13 of them.
Her
departure was sudden - she was called to a meeting and dismissed, forced to
clean her office and leave without bidding farewell to her staff - and she was replaced
quickly by Edwina McCann, editor of Harper's Bazaar.
Clements
describes her sacking simply as a 'regime change' that was part and parcel of
the dramatic Vogue narrative, but some critics believe the new book - her first
- is her way of exacting revenge on the Rupert Murdoch-owned title.
.webp)
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