"Twiggy & Justin" 1968 WHITESIDE, Thomas

"Twiggy & Justin" 1968 WHITESIDE, ThomasWHITESIDE, Thomas Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1968 First Edition 8 1 4" x 5 5 8" Jacket photograph by Richard Avedon Within an unbelievably short time, and from somewhere out of North London, a slight, boyish looking, Cockney accented young girl aptly nicknamed Twiggy has become the world's top fashion model, the idol of millions of teenage girls, and the hub of a big business involving products ranging from eyelashes to miniskirts. This has happened

WHITESIDE, Thomas

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

1968

First Edition

8 1/4" x 5 5/8"

Jacket photograph by Richard Avedon

Within an unbelievably short time, and from somewhere out of North London, a slight, boyish-looking, Cockney-accented young girl aptly nicknamed Twiggy has become the world's top fashion model, the idol of millions of teenage girls, and the hub of a big business involving products ranging from eyelashes to miniskirts. This has happened partly because of Twiggy's natural beauty and charm. It has also come to pass because Twiggy is represented by an extraordinary young man named Justin de Villeneuve, who, with little more business experience than selling bric-a-brac from a barrow in London's Chelsea district, brought Twiggy to America on a shoestring and showed such intuitive understanding of the ways of Madison Avenue that in six weeks both of them were able to leave this country with the assurance of becoming millionaires.

This delightful and sharply revealing book tells the story of Twiggy and Justin, a modern-day version of Pygmalion and Galatea. Thomas Whiteside, one of The New Yorker's most accomplished writers, first met Twiggy and Justin when, with great fanfare, they arrived in New York last March for a visit to model and promote "the Twiggy line" of clothes. Day after frantic day, Mr. Whiteside followed Twiggy and Justin through their exhausting rounds of fashion photographers' studios, press conferences, and swinging parties. He observed them coping with throngs of adoring teen-agers and kept up with Justin's often tempestuous meetings with TV network and advertising executives, and his shrewd dealings with all sorts of promoters and all kinds of what Justin called "jiggery-pokery." From his close-up view of Twiggy and Justin and their entourage, Mr. Whiteside has drawn an incisive portrait of two oddly fascinating people, and of the surrounding commercial corruption that both attracted and repelled them. Twiggy and Justin is a discerning look into the inner workings of the worlds of fashion and mass communications—the expert photographers, the editors and filmmakers, the publicists and Madison Avenue men, all of whom played a part in the almost instant creation of a celebrity and her transformation into a multi-million-dollar business.