This feelgood film directed by Sadie Frost is about the 60s fashion icon Twiggy; originally Lesley Hornby from Neasden in London, latterly Lesley Lawson after her marriage to actor Leigh Lawson, and then Dame Lesley Lawson with her DBE in 2019. (That is how she was gazetted, at all events, although Dame Twiggy has a ring to it.) With comments from A-listers including Edward Enninful and Suzy Menkes, it tells us the story of a working-class heroine with an almost eerily beautiful gamine face who became a fashion legend with a pop-star status that eluded earlier figures such as Jean Shrimpton, though without the smouldering attitude of the supermodel generation that came later.
Twiggy made a glorious success of her life, and never conformed to any tragic narrative about how triumph in the ephemeral world of fashion and fame must surely be punished with disaster. Subject to incessant sexist questioning about her body, she retained her good humour – perhaps because it never occurred to her to do anything else – and was at the centre of stunning fashion pictures in the late 60s, including Melvin Sokolsky’s amazing, quasi-Warholian shot of Twiggy in New York surrounded by people in Twiggy masks – surely one of the most vivid images of celebrity in modern times.
