The Cockney Kid

Up-to-the-mod in a brown 1930s cloche hat, a raccoon coat, red corduroy slacks and yellow boots, the fragile blonde with the grey-blue eyes and virginal face flew into Paris with her boy friend last week and promptly got lost looking for customs. The rosebud mouth parted, and it was Pygmalion all over again. "Aaaow, Justin," she com plained. "We're gaoin' the wrong w'y!"

Oh no they're not. For the girl is Twiggy, the Cockney Kid, and she's suddenly the hottest model in London.

Her photographs are all over the covers and the insides of British and French fashion magazines. She commands the very same modeling fee as Jean Shrimpton, the rage of 1965. Sculptor John Taylor is finishing a full-size model of Twiggy that will be reproduced as a show-window mannequin from London to Hong Kong. The vertical lash lines she affects on her lower lids are al ready called "Twiggies." Her manager boasts that she has rejected offers for Hollywood screen tests and pleas from top Manhattan model agencies, be cause, as Twiggy says, "Oi'm froightened of New York."

"A Teen-age Garbo." Her face must be her fortune, because her body certainly is not. Even for a model (and they are notoriously unbusty), Twiggy is twiggy. She is 5 ft. 6 1/2 in. tall, weighs scarcely 90 Ibs., measures a gaunt 31-22-32. Born Lesley Hornby, she is just 17 years old, a carpenter's daughter who lives with her mum and dad in a semidetached house in North London, still sleeps with a stuffed Teddy bear named "Growler" and likes nothing better for dessert than a banana with ice cream and hot chocolate sauce.

Twiggy's Henry Higgins is a 27-year-old former antique dealer, former hairdresser and former male model who goes under his camp name, Justin de Villeneuve. He took her to a hairdresser last February to have her long, scraggly locks chopped off. The London Daily Express's Fashion Editor Deirdre McSharry happened to be on hand for the shearing, was beguiled and ran her pictures next day--Twiggy was on her way. "When she became known, I became known with her," says Justin. "We've got that image now, and I'd hate it if we parted." As he sees her, "Twiggy's like a little boy and a little angel--she's a teen-age Garbo."

All Too Intoxicating. As others see her. Twiggy is a tantalizing contradiction. Wrote the weekly magazine London Life: "The girl's face is the epitome of sophistication. She looks untouched, detached, yet at the same time infinitely experienced. There's an illusion of world-weariness, a suggestion of arrogance, and a coolly quizzical glance." For all her sophisticated looks, shopgirls identify readily with Twiggy and her high-gear Justin, mob her as if she were a Beatle.

Under Justin's guidance, Twiggy has become not just a model but an industry. Already he has helped her to set up Twiggy Enterprises, Ltd., of which he is a partner. Soon there will be Twiggy boutiques and a Twiggy line of clothes (first design: a belted hybrid toga and kimono), and negotiations are under way with a cosmetics house in Paris for a Twiggy perfume. For a career that began only nine months ago, such success is at the moment all too intoxicating, and Justin is keeping his fingers crossed. "I almost starved," says he. "I don't want it to be that way for Twiggy."

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