Back to the Good Old Days - Part II

Those not of my generation will not fully understand why and how this image kicked me in the lower part of my body - normally private. It came to me via a marketing shot that fell into my wife's mailbox.Twiggy - the woman in silver - was the super-model of the super-models in my youth. She was everywhere - except in the popular press for doing drugs or beating up her associates. One talks about the druggie image that Kate Moss gave when she first appeared - this lady was the shorthand for anorexia nervosa. She was really just a clothes hanger with legs. Skinny. Skinny. Skinny.So here we see her in later years. M & S make her their headline character in some very expensive advertising. She - with the support from some very iconic women - pushed their sales right off the graph paper. And here she is with breasts. My God - Twiggy with a chest! Good luck to her but what gets me is that she is not so in love with the image of her past as that she is content that they are - how can I say it? - what is accurate but not insulting? - yes, Droopy is the word. No Hello Boys, no cowboy round them up and move them out for her.A woman content with her appearance. Respect.. Great respect Lesley Lawson.
The foregoing is a copy of an e-mail I sent to a number of associates yesterday. The article that kicked off my post here about the good old days came in just as I hit 'send' on that message. The concurrence of these two themes struck me – is the word serendipity? Twiggy – as a package marketed by her Svengali-like manager – was very attractive. Not in a sexual way; after all, who would want sex in a bed full of coat hangers? - but as a lifestyle personification. She lived the life that all us twenty-somethings in the '60s desired. Sure – Kate Moss inspires me to go find a few k's of cocaine and her mobile number. Naomi might inspire me to a latter-day great train robbery and a good boxers' head guard. Instant take-it-or-leave-it pleasure or gratification. A bit dirty – not the sort of girl one could take home to meet Mum. Nothing that persists. Nothing that inspires or will live on like Twiggy. Maybe that is what marks me as ill at ease with today's mores and ideas.