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?

Marilyn had a pudgy doughy look i suspect low muscle tone but her frame and skeleton must be very small as well.
Twiggy was abnormally skinny even back then, thats the whole point of her fame.

Absolute rubbish. People can be naturally slim, although on here if you dare mention that you’re classed as being a ‘little un’ or ‘teeny tiny’. I’m hardly small at 5’7” 🙄

She was skinny in the way a lot of teenagers naturally are. Eighties and nineties models, Jerry hall and later Naomi, Cindy, Linda etc were very slim but healthy. We have a completely warped view of what is healthy now although I do think sportswear sites have good athletic strong models and ozempic is having a positive impact in how we view obesity.

Exactly.

I think if you weren't around at that time, it's easy to not understand how Twiggy was so different.

It wasn't about her weight so much as the change of style.

Until then, women has weekly shampoo and sets at the hairdresser- concrete hair. And home perms. Or backcombed beehives.

They wore girdles and pointy Playtex Cross Your Heart bras.

Twiggy and Mary Quant wore the shorter straight hair cuts.
Mary Quant styled dresses that were A-line rather than nipped in at the waist.

It wasn't about 'being thin' but being whatever you wanted to be instead of conforming to the 36-24-36 shape that was considered perfect.

Naturally skinny is either generations of undereating and or metabolic illness just like a whole family with obesity but let them dare say naturally 'big boned' natural excuse is only allowed for the skinny it seems.

Nonsense. I'm guessing you weren't around in the 60s or 70s.

A skinny person claiming to eat like a horse makes me rolls my eyes just like a 300lb person telling me they eat like a bird. Who believes either 😂

The big difference in the past was a lack of UPF and people being more active. You walked to work, you swept and beat carpets, you did your fires every day etc. food for many was meat or fish , vegetables and fruit in season. Home made food. We have totally lost sight of normal weight. I say this as a size 16 overweight person.

When you stay with a skinny family their portions are tiny. I dont mean see them at one pub meal once a blue moon but actually live with them for a week or longer they really eat so little to them its normal portion.

I would say Marilyn Monroe would be a modern day UK size 10-12. I'm a size 4 so Monroe definitely wouldn't have been a modern day size 6. She was very curvy. It's just recent years where people call overweight women 'curvy'.

I think Twiggy was naturally slim but purposely didn't eat much to become very skinny. I read somewhere her bmi was 15, which is anorexic.

Fuck me, I can’t believe that you seriously suggested that rationing in the 1940’s ensured a decent diet and the healthiest generation of children ever!!???

Do you really need to swear to make a point?

I can't believe that you don't know that the rationing in the 1940s created the healthiest generation for a long time!

My parents were young teens during the war.
They didn't starve even though they were very very poor- in a way that would shock people nowadays.

But the difference was that women then knew how to make meals out of nothing.

My Gran would cook a sheep's head , pigs trotters or tripe.
They grew their own veg and never went short.
There was plenty of milk and a lot of families kept their own hens so had eggs and chickens.

They were far healthier than the 70% of adults who are now overweight.

I do because I was very slim until my mid 50s and, at 69, am still well into the normal weight range. I enjoy my food but avoid UPFs and sugary things and always have done but still eat plenty. I am active every day and walk rather drive if the journey is less than a mile or so. I also have other active pastimes like dance classes and walk my dog for an hour a day. Calories in/ calories out.

If you want to see tiny clothes go to somewhere where they are showing David Bowies stage outfits, or Mick Jaggers! Now they are minute.

I was Twiggys size when I was a teen, many of us were, we walked everywhere and danced a lot. We didn’t spend hours on our bums with a remote in our hands, though this is probably because the tv was limited and pretty rubbish. Fast food outlets were far and few between apart from fish and chips, and a fast food meal in a burger place , ie a wimpy bar, wasn’t something you would want to eat a lot of. I can remember the excitement when MacDonalds eventually arrived! We didn’t drink loads of fizzy sugar. And we didn’t snack much, we could often make it from one meal to the next without stuffing a couple of hundred extra calories in.

I was Twiggys size when I was a teen, many of us were, we walked everywhere and danced a lot.

I walked 4 miles a day from being 7 to leaving school at 18.

A mile to and from school, and the same to come home for my lunch.

Nowadays, where I live, parents take their kids to school in the car for a 1/4 mile trip.

It was actually the First World War that shocked the government into action. When young men were recruited they were weighed and measured and for the first time the powers saw how poorly nourished and underdeveloped the working classes were compared to middle class young men of the same age.

School meals were introduced, and I think school milk, though most of the other things like cod liver oil and clinic orange juice ( crammed full of sugar, it was delicious) didn’t appear until after the introduction of the health service post WW2.

That waist size would have been achieved with the help of a heavy duty corset though, which could easily shave off a couple of inches.

I agree that she was very slim however. I would say probably a contemporary British size 8-10.

I just measured my waist and hips out of curiosity, waist is 30" and hips 38". I wear a size 12 jeans and am an inch shorter than Marilyn Monroe...i find it hard to believe she could have been more than a uk size 8. (I didn't do my chest because it's flat so not really comparable)

My mum was the same measurements as twiggy and is still very thin now she's in her 70s. She eats well and got lucky with genetics. It's not something she's "done"

My 18 yo daughter is 5ft 6 and weighs 7.5 stone. She wears a 4.

She was weigh recently at the docs and the nurse didn't say a thing about her weight.

She is bmi 16.7 I believe.
She was born 9th percentile and followed that her whole life so far.

Just lucky I guess.

I'm 5.4 and weigh 10.8 and a size 12. I've just lost a stone dieting as well. I'm not so lucky. I have to work at it as I put on weight easily.

She was only 16 when she started modelling, lots of girls are very thin at that age.

Apart from the dictionary definition - partly male, partly female - it is a fashion term, and very much a seventies term

Agreed. I clearly remember "The Androgynous Look" from my tween magazines.
I remember it so clearly because I had to look it up in a dictionary.

Twiggy was definitely not an average sized person even in the 1960s when people were thinner. She was noticeably skinny - hence her nickname! She was 5’6ish and measured 31 23 32. But she was a naturally thin teenager. Marilyn Monroe was 5’5.5” weighed (when not pregnant) just under 120lbs with a BMI of around 19. She usually measured a curvy 36 24 34 though she was a bit thinner towards the end of her life. She was a size 12 in her lifetime and would be a modern size 6 - 8 - except for her chest measurement. It’s quite shocking to see how tiny her clothes are in real life.

Yes, MM was tiny just busty and had a bum.

I did know someone who had to eat every couple of hours because she was starving. Eating would involve sandwiches made with a full loaf of bread and cakes or an extra large pizza with baked potatoes and coleslaw, or a full English with 6 sausages and six rashers of bacon

She was the same weight as her height.
She had older male relatives who were the same. It was a genetic issue
It looked like a fantastic way to be, eat what you want and still be slim but the cost and the time it took to pay for and prepare meals each day meant her life was governed by food
She had been the same since the day she was born, having triple what a normal new born would have

She was just naturally skinny no? My daughter is the same. Eats like a horse, in the gym lifting weights 4 times a week, 5ft 5 and a natural size 6. She can't put weight on. Not unhealthy. Just tiny. God knows where it comes from as both her dad and I are a bit more rotund to say the least.

Much the same here a few years later. Due to my boob size I had to buy "outsize" quite often.