Twiggy

1966

Barry Lategan had more than a helping hand in the creation of the ultimate fashion icon of the sixties. Twiggy. He produced photographs for Leonard’s of Mayfair, one of London’s top hair salons and in 1966 took the first studio pictures of schoolgirl would-be model, Twiggy, after Leonard had ‘discovered’ her in the salon. The photographs were used by the Daily Express and the rest is history. Since then a string of famous faces have sat before his camera, Jean Shrimpton, Bianca Jagger, Paul and Linda McCartney, Iman, Salman Rushdie, Princess Anne and FW de Klerk, to name but a few. Lategan has also made a name for himself in advertising as well as fashion, and his work has appeared in Vogue, Elle, Harpers and Life. He has won numerous awards both for his photography and for TV commercials. Particularly notable is his 1988 Pirelli calendar, which won the Halina award, described as “tour de force of applied photography in a challenging, commercial promotional context.” As one of Britain’s master photographers, his work ranks alongside that of David Bailey and Terence Donovan. He has not however sought media attention that some of his contemporaries have. “Irving Penn said to me once” said Lategan, “that the artist should not be more of a hero than his work. And I agree with him.” Barry Lategan was born in South Africa in 1935, and came to England to study at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. His study was interrupted by a call to National Service in Germany, where he developed an interest in photography. After returning to South Africa he trained with Ginger Odes in Cape Town, who offered him the words, “You’re a lucky man if you can make your hobby your work.” He returned to London in the early 1960s to open a photographic studio. After living in the US throughout the 80s, Barry Lategan now lives and works in London. His photographs have been exhibited and retained by the Victoria and Albert Museum, The National Portrait Gallery, the Olympus Gallery, the Royal Photographic Society, Bath and the South African National Gallery. In the opening address to the “New School 1993” Exhibition in New Delhi, Adrian Flowers said of Lategan, “I just know that he’s been taking photographs for a very long time – with an insight and a perseverance that is quite extraordinary and he is capable of a kind of in-depth feeling towards things. I think you will find what he has done has a purity that is undeniable. _______________________________________________ Barry Lategan's Take on this photograph: _______________________________________________ At the start of my career as a photographer in the world of fashion, I worked initially for hairdressers, photographing their new hairstyles – my clients, among others, included Vidal Sassoon, Harold Leighton, and Leonard. One day Leonard phoned me to say that a friend of his had brought in a young girl he had discovered working as a shampoo girl in a hairdressing salon in Neasden. The friend was Justin de Villeneuve and he had conceived the idea of making the girl into a model and as the first step had taken her to Leonard’s West End hairdressing salon. She came to my studio with Justin. When I first saw her, I could not see anything special about her. She was extremely skinny with hair down to her shoulders. As she walked around my studio, she starting biting her nails and Justin said “Don’t do that Twigs”. I said why do you call her that and he said because she is so skinny. I said what a great name, Twiggy. I called Leonard and said something needed to be done about the girl’s hair before I would photograph her. When she came to my studio the next day, she was completely transformed – her short hair looked fantastic and she had painted her eyelashes on her face at Justin’s suggestion. Justin was very instrumental in the making of Twiggy. Up to then models usually came out of the Lucy Clayton School of Modelling and fell into certain categories: catwalk, photographic, beauty models, catalogue models. Leonard put my photograph of Twiggy up in his salon and I had a call from Deidre McSharry then fashion edition of the Daily Express. She asked me who the girl was and I replied that her name was Lesley Hornby and her nickname was “Twiggy”. Deidre ran a story on Lesley with the photo “This is the face of ‘66” “Twiggy, the cockney kid with the face to launch a thousand shapes and she’s only sixteen.” The rest is history. ___________________________________ Twiggy's Take of the photograph: __________________________________________________ You can imagine how awe-inspiring it was for me to go to Leonard’s in Upper Grosvenor Street. I’d been accustomed to the hairdressing salon where I worked, of course, but this was Mayfair, a whole different scene, and I was still a schoolgirl from Neasden, after all. I was overwhelmed by it. My hair was to be cut by a boy called Clifford. At that time it was getting long, but it was thin, and I’d tinted it myself, and people weren’t into hair conditioning so it was pretty terrible, although it was lucky I hadn’t been backcombing it and splitting all the ends the way most people did. Clifford set my hair for me, but it was so thin it wouldn’t take. He said, ‘Let me bring Leonard up himself.’ And when Leonard arrived he and Justin realized that they had been old friends together when they were fifteen and had worked together at Vidal Sassoon’s. Justin had been known as Mr. Christian there. They hadn’t seen each other for years but Leonard had gone on to become this big grand hairdresser. So they talked together for a while and I was very frightened of Leonard, very shy. Everything seemed so intimidating in that place. Then Leonard, without my knowing, went downstairs and phoned the photographer Barry Lategan. I don’t know what he said exactly but I assume he said something like, he’d got a girl here he thought Barry would like. Because when Leonard came back he told me Barry Lategan would like to see me and he was very good with new young girls. At that time Barry was quite newly established as a photographer. And I now know how lucky I was that I met him: other photographers might have scared me to death – in fact some of them later did – the really hip ones who were always playing Mr. Cool. Barry was different from all the others and still is; he’s so gentle, sweet and nice. So Justin and I left Leonard’s and got a bus down Baker Street. I think we had to borrow the bus fare again. We were really broke. We went into Barry’s studio and I was being very shy again, and he asked me sit in front of the camera and he just looked at me. Then he went to phone Leonard. He said, ‘I like her, but her hair’s a mess.’ Leonard said if I would be the house model for his new hairstyle, I would get a free haircut and a set of pictures. And I actually hesitated when I thought about it. Like most girls then I had a thing about growing my hair. I still have, really – I prefer to have my hair long. But when I thought about it, I realized I’d be crazy not to say yes. And Justin said, ‘Don’t worry, he’ll just chop the tatty ends.’ What a joke! While I was at Barry’s studio and he was showing me round all the equipment, I was so nervous I was biting my nails as usual, and Justin said, ‘Don’t do that, Twigs.’ And Barry said, ‘What do you call her?’ because I’d been introduced to him as Lesley. And he said, ‘What a great name – Twiggy. If you go into this game professionally you should call yourself that.’ I didn’t make any particular effort to be photographable in front of Barry’s camera that day. He didn’t take any shots, he just watched me through the lens. I know now that one is either photogenic or one isn’t. I’m not being vain or anything when I say that, it’s just a fact. You can work on it. I don’t always think that photographic models are beautiful away from the camera, but they happen to photograph well. And the most beautiful woman in the world might be hopelessly unphotogenic. I’ve seen an incredible woman, a cross between Sophia Loren and the young Ingrid Bergman, who simply froze in front of a camera. I was with Leonard for eight hours, the day he did that new hairstyle. He cut it, coloured it, re-cut it, did the highlights. They kept drying it to see if it fell right. Those short haircuts have to be absolutely precise. The back was just an inch long, with a little tail, and the front very smooth. I thought it was marvellous. The next day I had the pictures done at Barry’s, and they were a great success. I thought they were fantastic, amazing pictures. My mum was the only one who didn’t care for my new hairstyle. She was quite upset: she said it was just like an elf’s cap on top of my head. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘they’ve spoilt your lovely hair.’ But I just jigged around in front of her and she soon had to agree it was much more me. Justin: She really looked extraordinary when she emerged at the end of that day. I’d always thought her head was the most wonderful shape, but now her hair was cut so cleverly to show the shape – she was an amazing sight. All the clients at Leonard just turned and gasped. There was this little Cockney girl in a little white gown, with her long neck and her huge huge eyes – she looked like a fawn. She looked like Bambi. I knew then that she really was going to make it. Barry started booking me for photographic modelling jobs then. But almost immediately, a fashion editor who was a regular client of Leonard saw the pictures of me up in the salon. It was Deidre McSharry, then fashion editor of the Daily Express. She asked Leonard who the girl in the picture was. Deirdre McSharry telephoned Barry Lategan to ask where to contact the girl in the photograph and he replied her name was Lesley Hornby and her nickname is “Twiggy”. A few days later the photograph was published naming me as “Twiggy the face of l966”. I had no great expectations of these photos or the interview with Deidre. I honestly never imagined what would happen as a result of them. I didn’t dare hope. I just thought, Oh, she might write something about me some time. What did appear really knocked me out. We got the papers that day and there it was – ‘This is the face of ’66.’ A whole page! It called me ‘Twiggy, the Cockney kid with the face to launch a thousand shapes and she’s only sixteen.’ It was an amazing bit of publicity when I hadn’t even begun modelling properly yet. We had a bit of a laugh over the part of the story that said, ‘Three weeks ago she left school; now she’s already making £100 a week.’ I hadn’t in fact made any money at all yet. You have to wait ages to be paid for anything in modelling and we going everywhere by bus and we were quite broke. We got no money for about six months.