Twiggy in Black and White by Twiggy Lawson (Lesley Hornby)

Published 1997  chapter 3   early 1960s

Before long, Biba was Mecca to everyone from shopgirls to debs…. Not only did the clothes look amazing, you could afford to buy something every week. I remember I bought a dress in brushed cotton jersey, lemon with shocking pink zig zags… Already the hemlines were creeping up. It was two inches above the knee. The first dress I bought was a linen shift with a keyhole neck. Another one I remember was A-line with tight, tight sleeves that ended in a puff at the shoulder, with little pearl buttons at the neck. All classics. If only I had kept them.

It wasn’t like any other shop I had ever seen. There were no rails, just clothes hanging off wooden hat stands and wicker baskets filled with T-shirts like vests with shoe-lace necks. There wasn’t even a proper changing room and not even that much choice. The clothes changed all the time… there were no women saying ‘can I help you madam?’ just young girls with long blonde hair wandering about tidying up the clothes that littered the floor and hanging them back on the hat stands….

observations: When Lucy Fisher, friend to this blog, recommends a book, then I always listen. She said I should read this, so I did: it is no work of literature – considering it is ghost-written it ought to be a bit better – but it does tell a fascinating story, and my goodness Twiggy loves her clothes. Her eye, her passion, her memory for virtually everything she ever wore is riveting. Although she came from nowhere as a model (no experience, no contacts, not really tall enough), you suspect that if she hadn’t been derailed she would have had a most successful career in her first choice, which was clothes design. One excellent detail is that before she hit the big-time, she was making enough money to live on just by making a couple of pairs of trousers a week for a market-stall.

The book contains a lot of lists of Twiggy’s famous friends – all lovely people that she adores – and of her triumphs on stage and screen. But sometimes her voice comes through more strongly, and it is usually over clothes or in one case make-up – after 30 years she can explain why she thought Yardley was not the right name for her to be linked with, and how exactly the colours of their Twiggy lines were different from what she was actually wearing. She also had a deal with chemical company Monsanto, who were making man-made fibres then but are now more famous for GM food, and this picture is part of a campaign for Klopman Mills, another fabric firm:

The book ends before she took up the role she is now known for in the UK: being the face of the retailing giant Marks & Spencer. No doubt there will be another slice of memoir later…

Biba was one of the game-changers of the 1960s until eventually they went out of business – it was very dark in the shop, and was widely believed to be a shop-lifter’s paradise. Everyone did love the clothes, and the top illo is from one of the mail order catalogues they produced in 1968/69 so that young girls in the provinces could aim to look like that too, or at least look at the pictures.