Twiggy… omg

[Newsenmum]

I knew she was skinny but I never knew how bad it was! Looking at those photos of her in the 60s is painful.Why do we do this to ourselves? Have we done this since time began?

I was just reading how in the Victorian times there was another skinny phase where women liked to look skinny and weak like they’d had TB. Awful!

Does anyone know if it’s ever been fashionable to be healthy?

She was 17 and naturally thin.

Not a great lion for many to try to aspire to.

Models
From the
80s were sporty and to
Some degree
curvy. Claudia Naomi cindy Crawford etc

Marilyn monroe was very curvy

Look not lion

My Mum was a model in the 60's/70's and I still have some clothes that she had from her job that are almost child sized. It was a "look". Twiggy was naturally very slim and small framed. My daughter is the same. I'm not, I hasten to add!

Odd thing to suddenly observe?

I think the notion of what 'healthy' looks like changes over time, and certainly we're not healthy now compared to the 1940s when rationing generally ensured a decent diet and what's now considered the healthiest generation of children ever.

fwiw I don't think Twiggy's a great example - she was naturally v slim as lots of young women in the 50s/60s were, I don't think she 'did' anything to herself to achieve that look. I think you need to look to the 90s when 'heroin chic' was a thing - Victorian's aside, i think that was when looking both thin & unwell became fashionable. Before that it was slim and fit - look at food and fashion ads from the 20s-70s in women's mags etc, they were all about vim, vigour and vitality.

The whole mid-60s Mary Quant 'look' was about childlike clothes - lots of smocks, gingham, buttons - and Twiggy serendipitously embodied that that huge-eyed child aesthetic. Other Sixties models like Pattie Boyd, were slim and very young, but not nearly as bird-like.

Marilyn Monroe was, in reality a size 6 - 8 therefore not "very curvy"

Renaissance?

If you look on YT at archive films of every day folk from years ago most people were very slim. Our current obesity crisis is warping what we now see as ‘normal’ body shapes and what isn’t.

I was born in the early 70’s and have always been very slim without starving myself, I was as slim as twiggy and tbh so were a lot of my friends. My dd16 is very slim also but doesn’t starve herself, far from it. Some people are naturally very slim.

Nearly everyone was slim in the 70s

I can't see how Twiggy looked 'painful', she just looked normal.

When I went away to college aged 18 in 1973 my measurements were 38” 26” 36”.

Compared with everyone I knew I was fat.

Throughout history trends of size have fluctuated. Take a look a renaissance nude paintings and you'll find plenty of women with curves not jutting bones - venus of urbino by Titian as an example. Sometimes its fashionable to be thin, sometimes its a sign of affluence and wealth (and thus fashionable!) to have a good covering on your bones from plenty to eat. I think people should focus more on health, are we fit, can we run and climb stairs without getting out of puff.

She just looks like a very slim teen. Being sort of slim was the norm generally anyway. We are all so much bigger these days.

Marilyn was a very long way from being a 6 - 8
Are you using American sizing?

She was easily a 14 UK size of the time
ie: Primark/M&S size 6-8 of current times 🙄

Don't be daft. I'm size 6-8 and look nothing like MM

I believe she was a size 8 equivalent to today.

MM had a tiny frame but decent boobs and bum.
Her waist was generally 22 inches.
I visited the Hollywood museum which has loads of MM stuff and her dresses are certainly no bigger than current uk size 8.

Yes didn't someone try to wear MM's dress and find it was teeny? It's interesting to compare sizes.

Twiggy’s whole thing as a model was that she was very slim to the point of androgyny. If that was ‘normal’ she wouldn’t have been so famous or interesting to people. Obviously most people were slim, but most people weren’t that slim.

3min video of people travelling on the London underground in 60s pretty much everyone was slim

8

The 22 inches waist is because of corsets and being sewn into her clothes.

She didn’t do anything to herself! She lived at home and sometimes ate egg and chips twice a day. I was the same at 16.

It’s all in the narrowness of the skeleton front on. Claudia Schiffer is tiny but tall, Patti Boyd tiny and not so tall. They are quite normal body fat wise - it all sits on a much smaller frame.

Not much you can do to change your bone shape, is there. The only person I think
looked better for losing a lot of weight was Princess Diana cos her very long limbs and toned muscles emerged (via bulimia).

All this crap about people pre WWII being thinner - 1/3 of the populace was undernourished FFS. That’s what poverty means.

WWII fixed a centuries old problem with ration books for everyone so the badly paid ate adequately.

Sigh. ARFID eaters don’t like facts. We knew that, I spose.

Twiggy wasn't androgynous. She was fully female.