London Calling. London Walks connecting. This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead. Story time. History time.
September 19th.
And happy birthday to a London girl.
A very London girl.
Though you might not have guessed where this particular London story was going if you’d been standing outside number 93 St Raphael’s Way, Neasden, in the early 1960s.
Because this is the story of how a shy, skinny, clothes-mad schoolgirl from Neasden became one of the most famous faces on earth.
Twiggy.
Born Lesley Hornby on September 19th, 1949.
And yes, Neasden.
Let’s put it on the map.
North-west London. Out beyond Kilburn. Up towards Wembley. Semis, suburban streets, ordinary working London.
Not exactly the first place you’d have gone looking for the face that was going to define Swinging London.
Twiggy remembers playing in the garden on Saturday afternoons and knowing when a goal had gone in at Wembley because she could hear the roar.
That’s how London this story is.
Her dad, Norman, was a carpenter and joiner. Lancashire-born, solid, practical, down-to-earth. Her mum, Nell, worked in a printing factory.
They lived in a 1930s semi. Norman was one of the first of his workmates to buy his own house.
And Lesley was the youngest of three girls.
Ordinary family. Ordinary house. Ordinary London suburb.
Except, of course, there was nothing ordinary about what was coming.
And there are London roots here.
On her mother’s side they go back into Victorian London. Her grandmother Alice was born in Willesden. Alice grew up one of seven children in a family squeezed into just two rooms.
Go another generation back and you find one of those London lives that could furnish a podcast all by itself.
Twiggy’s great-great-grandmother Grace.
Poverty. Theft. Prison. Hard labour.
And then, having apparently gone straight, Grace died in 1891 after being caught up in the crush at a bargain sale in a department store in Mare Street, Hackney.
You couldn’t make it up.
Fashion, you might say, was already dangerous in this family.
Fast forward to Neasden.
Young Lesley loves clothes.
Loves them.
She’s a Mod. Jean Shrimpton is her idol. Pictures of Jean Shrimpton and the Beatles go up on the bedroom wall.
She can’t really afford Vogue, so she stands in the newsagent reading the fashion magazines until somebody asks her to leave.
And she makes clothes.
Her mother had taught her to sew.
There wasn’t really a teenage fashion market yet. There were children’s clothes. There were grown-up clothes.
And then along came Biba and Mary Quant.
Which is rather nice for us because we were talking about Biba on this podcast just the other day.
Same London. Same revolution.
Young people saying, essentially: we don’t want to look like our parents.
Lesley’s plan was to go to art school and become a fashion designer.
And somewhere along the way, Lesley Hornby acquired another name.
She was so skinny, those impossibly long, thin legs in particular, that friends called her Twigs.
Twigs became Twiggy.
And really, could there have been a better name?
Short. Cheeky. Young. Unmistakable. You could almost see the girl just from hearing it.
Lesley Hornby was about to disappear from view.
Twiggy was coming.
And the transformation began with a haircut.
Early 1966.
She’s sixteen.
She ends up at the fashionable House of Leonard hair salon in Mayfair. Leonard is looking for models on whom he can try a new short haircut.
Lesley’s hair comes off.
Photographer Barry Lategan takes photographs.
And then Lesley goes home.
Back to Neasden.
Back to school.
And that might have been that.
Except that the fashion editor of the Daily Express, Deirdre McSharry, happens to walk into the salon.
She sees the photographs.
Who.
Is.
That?
She tracks the girl down.
And in February 1966, the Daily Express publishes photographs of this extraordinary-looking sixteen-year-old under the words:
TWIGGY: THE FACE OF ’66.
And the fuse is lit.
She becomes visual shorthand for Swinging London.
Enormous eyes. Painted lower lashes. Freckles. Crop. Miniskirt. Those extraordinary stick-thin limbs.
And here’s the detail I love.
Those famous eyes?
That make-up wasn’t dreamed up by some grand Parisian make-up artist.
Twiggy devised it herself.
Three pairs of eyelashes on top. Painted lashes underneath.
And the inspiration for those painted lower lashes?
A rag doll in her bedroom in Neasden.
London fashion history by way of a child’s toy.
And then everything goes mad.
Paris.
New York.
America.
At JFK airport in 1967 photographers, journalists and fans swarm around her.
The girl who couldn’t afford Vogue is suddenly appearing in Vogue.
She’s photographed by Richard Avedon. Cecil Beaton. Bert Stern.
Diana Vreeland takes her up.
And the world goes Twiggy-mad.
But here’s something important.
She didn’t look like the established fashion models.
She was five foot six. Working class. Young. Boyish. Almost shockingly thin.
And she didn’t sound like the old fashion world either.
That was part of it.
This wasn’t just a new face.
It was a new London.
A London in which youth mattered.
A London in which class barriers were wobbling.
A London of Mods and minis, Quant and Biba, Beatles and boutiques.
A London suddenly looking less towards the drawing room and more towards the street.
And Twiggy was its face.
But she wasn’t going to spend the rest of her life standing in front of a camera looking thin.
At twenty she essentially packed in full-time modelling.
Twenty!
Most careers haven’t even started.
Hers had already conquered the world.
She became an actress. A singer. A stage performer.
She starred in Ken Russell’s The Boy Friend and won two Golden Globes.
She went to Broadway.
Indeed, she’s said that Broadway, rather than modelling, gave her some of the greatest professional happiness of her life.
There was a private life as well.
In 1977 she married the American actor Michael Witney.
Their daughter Carly was born the following year.
Then tragedy.
Witney died suddenly of a heart attack in 1983.
Twiggy was a widow with a young daughter.
A year later she met the actor Leigh Lawson.
They married in 1988.
And they’re still married.
All these decades later.
And the extraordinary thing is that Twiggy is still Twiggy.
She turns 77 today.
Still unmistakable.
Still those eyes.
Still that face.
Still remarkably slender, though she has always insisted that the teenage Twiggy wasn’t starving herself. She was simply built that way.
She says she ate like a horse.
These days there’s healthy eating and Pilates.
And sewing.
Yes, sewing.
The girl from Neasden who made her own clothes because she couldn’t afford the fashionable ones has said that she still sits down at home and makes things.
I love that.
And she hasn’t lost London either.
She has described herself as a Londoner through and through.
She still lives in London.
And, full disclosure, our paths have crossed.
Forty years or so ago, a bunch of us went out to dinner one night at Joe Allen’s in Covent Garden.
Twiggy was part of the party.
And I sat next to her.
So there you are.
I broke bread with Twiggy.
I wish I could now produce some dazzling anecdote, some priceless piece of Twiggy table talk.
I can’t.
It was a long time ago.
But I remember the person.
Warm. Friendly. Completely unstarry.
And perhaps that’s rather fitting.
Because underneath one of the most famous faces of the 20th century was still, unmistakably, that London girl from Neasden.
And there’s a wonderful recent photograph of her looking out across west London, spotting Wembley in the distance and pointing:
I grew up over there.
Over there.
Neasden.
Number 93 St Raphael’s Way.
A carpenter’s daughter.
A schoolgirl who rolled up her uniform skirt to make it shorter.
Who read fashion magazines in the newsagent because she couldn’t afford to buy them.
Who copied clothes she liked and made them herself.
Who painted eyelashes underneath her eyes because she’d seen them on a rag doll.
And who, before she was out of her teens, had become one of the most recognisable human beings on the planet.
There’s a new documentary about her.
The world is looking at Twiggy again.
But perhaps the nicest verdict on the whole extraordinary journey came from Twiggy herself.
Not too bad for a girl from Neasden.
Not too bad at all.
Happy birthday, Twiggy.
London girl. London face. London original.
And finally, our word for the day.
Gamine.
G-A-M-I-N-E.
Gamine.
A word that might almost have been invented for Twiggy.
Slim. Youthful. Boyish. Wide-eyed. A little mischievous.
The gamine look.
But follow the word home and it takes us across the Channel.
It’s French. The masculine gamin originally meant a street boy. A street urchin. A mischievous kid running around the streets of Paris.
Gamine was the girl.
And somehow that scruffy little French street urchin grew up, crossed the Channel, got a Mayfair haircut, painted eyelashes under her eyes and became…
Twiggy.
Not too bad for a word either.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead.
See ya tomorrow.