A Twiggy Image

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A Twiggy Image

1. Not merely handled as a precious package, but portrayed as one. Physically, she fit the part. Her hair was bobbed short to her jaw and always slicked down, parted from one side across to the other. It was a soft blonde; perhaps the only soft thing about her as the rest of her body met at sharp angles and was marked with dark lines. The skin appeared silky, unblemished and unwrinkled, still glowing with the youth of seventeen years. The eyes that met yours were large and dark, a very dramatic appeal. The lashes were fake; long and thick layers outlining the sunken pupils. Her lips sat pursed between a perfectly pointed nose and chin. This face graced the cover of Life , Look , Newsweek , Vogue , and Seventeen and filled pages within numerous American magazines and newspapers. The body that supported such a face stood as the foundation for fame and the force driving the photos. Measuring five-feet six inches from her blond head to her trendy shoed toes, she was lanky. At only ninety-one pounds, the long limbs were nothing but flesh and bone. Knobby knees and jutting elbows made graceful movements angular. Flat. No breasts curved out from her torso and no buttocks rounded from her back. She was shapeless, asexual. Thus, she was distinctive; no one before had looked quite like her. She was the “It Girl,” who resembled an adolescent boy. She was England's “Face of ‘66” (Whiteside 87). And when she stepped off of the airplane at JFK International Airport in New York in 1967, Twiggy became a “universal heroine for teenagers” (Whiteside 54).

2. In 1967, America was hit with its newest trend—Twiggy. She emerged suddenly, appearing with the wink of a darkly lined and thickly lashed eye. Twiggy's impact, how...

... middle of paper ...

...nda Benn. “This Year's Girl: A Personal/Critical History of Twiggy.” On Fashion . Ed. Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994. 41-58.

Freeman, Jo. “The Women's Liberation Movement: Its Origins, Structures and Ideas.” 23 April 2003 <http://www.jofreeman.com/feminism/liberationmov.htm>.

Lawson, Twiggy. Twiggy in Black and White: An Autobiography . London: Pocket Books, 1997.

Twiggy. Twiggy . London: Hart-Davis, Mac Gibbon, 1975.

Whiteside, Thomas. Twiggy and Justin . New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968.

Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society . New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

- - -, Marxism and Literature . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are used Against Women . New York: Doubleday, 1991. 9-19, 179-217.

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