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?

I agree. She was very young. It's not hard to be very slim when you're a teenager.

Also, she was quite short for a model, so her frame wouldn't have seemed so tiny by the glamazon standards of contemporary models.

i remember seeing a film with twiggy, The Boyfriend
they were dancing,
on the floor, and she was the one with the stick thin legs,

This is bonkers

So you can be in perfect health, fertile and sexually appealing to the opposite sex.

But somehow, you're unhealthy because Mirkolo on Mumsnet said so. Whatever helps you sleep at night, but people can be naturally slim or naturally a bit more curvy. Too bad.

@RogueFemale why are you picking up on this so much? There absolutely is a style in fashion that is "androgynous". No one is saying Twiggy isn't female. I suggest you take your faux outrage elsewhere.

Plus what?
I've always wanted to know- when using the term plus sized, what is it plus?

Men can be anything from a 30" chest to a 50" chest and no one calls them plus or minus anything.

Hilarious isn't it? They always hit all the bingo card numbers too!

✅ I've always been naturally slim.
✅ She looks normal to me. (She looks like you could snap her).
✅ People have lost sight of what a normal portion looks like.
✅ Everyone was slim back then. (They weren't)
✅ Some people are naturally skinny. (Yeah, because they don't eat enough).

Being frail is nothing to be proud of. 😅 It just means you probably don't meet your daily requirement for any nutrients you need, and you've got no "cushion" for serious illness where you're unable to eat for a period of time.

Being overweight is nothing to be proud of either.

Most models are underweight 🤷‍♀️

My dd has an ED and I am on several parent support groups, it's not unusual for anorexic teens to be approached by model scouts...

The desire to make women appear small, childlike and weak has sadly been around for a while.

It's true that it cuts both ways. These threads always end in a bun fight between big people and small people. There is a mid ground...

I work with a lot of women who are decades younger than me. I also work with a couple of women my age in a very physical job.

Compared to the girls and women in their teens and 20s the ones my age are faster, fitter and can lift heavier items than the younger ones.

I can’t imagine the younger ones making it to their 60s or 70s just by their lifestyle and the types of food they enjoy and their lack of energy, Even outside of work everything’s seems to involve a lot of sitting down

Exactly. My partner is "naturally skinny" and struggles to put weight on but the only thing that's "natural" is his forgetfulness to eat, he gets full quickly, he just has a lower appetite than most people and has a warped idea of how much he eats, just like many fat people do. It's not a good thing. In intense periods of stress he is very vulnerable to becoming even more underweight. I'm slightly overweight and all my health markers are better than his. (We took part in a health study together).

Big boned? It's not the size of the bones that are the problem it is the coverage of fat on them and there are no bones in your stomach.

When I was at school we did have one “ large” teacher, she was considered larger as was very much bigger. She was about a todays size 16 - which back in the 70s was a size 20

our entire view of how people look is distorted

My dd does modelling occasionally

She has tried the gym on a handful of occasions but has never really taken to it
She is very tall and weighs 8 stone and is a UK size 0-2 but eats a lot of cake, chocolate (her car is littered with chocolate bar wrappers and take away containers)
Calories mean nothing to her. The one thing she does is walk. 30-50,000 steps in a day. This is part of one of her jobs which she does at least 3 days per week, maybe 7 days per week depending on other work stuff

I think one thing that many posters are forgetting is that Twiggy was a child of rationing, which did not stop until 1954, food choices were much more limited with much less processed food. Ownership of cars was less common, so you used public transport, cycled or walked to wherever you were going. Life was much less sedentary. Yes, she was a skinny child, hence being called Twigs, but back than being skinny was not uncommon and none of that detracts from her success as a woman.

This clip is from 1987. The group were called the Roly Polys and their USP was that they were all really fat.

i doubt they would be considered particularly fat now apart from, possibly, the older lady.

Calories mean nothing to her. The one thing she does is walk. 30-50,000 steps in a day

@Yalta 50K steps is about 25 miles. Is that right?

MM weight fluctuated throughout her career, but her clothes never looked tiny , in Gentlemen prefer blondes and how to marry a millionaire she had a lovely slim but curvy figure.

But im not disputing that women and models in particular were smaller back then.

When I went to see the Dior exhibition in Paris , they had the pièce de résistance , the Bar jacket, the first ever Dior design showcased in the middle of the room and you could get a 360 view , the jacket was absolutely tiny. Really small shoulders and tiny tiny waist and as you move through the exhibition from the late 40s to 80s and 90s , 00s the clothes shape and sizes get bigger . A model from the 1950s would absolutely disappear in an 80s or 90s dress , and there is no way that someone like Yasmin le Bon or Linda evangelista could fit into 50s or 60s clothes.

Yep, another attempt of the patriarchy to infantilise women: creating an impossible beauty standard where grown up women look like children, and the 90% of women who were not born with big eyes and a very small frame will have to starve in order to achieve said standard. I yet have to see a generation of painfully skinny men with big eyes desperate for the female gaze. It's funny how "body trends" throughout the decades always apply to women and not to men, they're always confident pot belly and all.

People aren't saying that. You're exaggerating to try to make a point.

-Yes, a lot of people are naturally slim.
-She (Twiggy) is normal for a very slim person. She was only around 16 then and some young girls are very thin.
-Yes, people have lost sight of a normal portion.( eg a whole pizza is supposed to serve 4, not 1 person.)
-Most people 'back then' were a healthy weight. Now, 70% are overweight. Fact.
-Some people ARE naturally thin and it's not because they under eat.

Being slim doesn't equal being frail.
Frailty is a medical classification and based on muscle strength not simply weight.

They are and were my friends or house shared with different sets of men and women in my twenties. Actually, one man in the house share was naturally thin and could eat what he wanted in his twenties, he would literally order two takeaways at 11pm and would have eaten all day, this was a regular occurrence with lots of beer but now at 40 he cannot do that. In my teens I was always hanging out with my girlfriends and we would talk about putting on weight anyway so I do know that none of them could eat what they wanted whatever they wanted. Friends or Mums of DC’s friends who are thin are just very restrictive, very obsessive over exercise and running, yoga etc, they are certainly not eating whatever they want. So no, I don’t know anybody. I think it is likely at 17 more compared to 40 though.

It is a bit warped isn't it. I went to see a musical at the local theatre last week. It was good and the dancers were great but I'd say out of the 8 female dancers 3 were overweight and one was possibly obese, so 4 a healthy weight. Go back and a dancer bordering on obese wouldn't get a job (we've got friends who were professional dancers but retired now so I know how strict it was with weight.)

There was an older woman in a supporting role, she was probably 50ish, and she was the slimmest woman in the show, 30 years ago most if not all of them would have been her build.

I don't normally think about weight but it did actually really strike me at that show.

A lot of her “curvier” pictures was from when she was pregnant / just after pregnancy.

Yes I remember them, it was funny then that such fat women were dancing. The show I referred to earlier half the dancers were that size or bigger.

And yet if you Google the average female weight and height in the UK at that time it’s states 5ft 2 which is pretty short and 9 stone 10 lbs, that is not Twiggy proportions. Twiggy was 17 year old girl as well and where I live and where my DD shops - Brandy Melville type places there are loads of girls that are that size, in Brandy Melville they only sell one size of clothing. The trousers are actually to wide for my DD but it is basically not a woman’s shop it is for girls!