Volume 11, Number 1 · July 11, 1968
Dumb Show
By Margot Hentoff
Twiggy and Justin
by Thomas Whiteside
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 122, 14 of photographs pp., $4.50
There is little point in insisting that each book one examines reflects the Zeitgeist. The temptation, nevertheless, is there—especially in the case of so minimal a subject as Twiggy and Justin, an account of their visit to New York in the spring of 1967. Twiggy, you will recall, is a photographer's model, very young, very thin, British working class, inarticulate, an occasional reference point (by virtue of her short hair and flat chest) for the decline of sexual differentiation in the world today. Justin de Villeneuve is her creator and manager, somewhat older, shrewd, a symbol in his way of the rise of the working class. Last year they came to America to more fully exploit Twiggy's international commercial possibilities, and the media made a fuss about them for a while—hard news having been harder to come by that year than this. Thomas Whiteside was one of the people who followed Twiggy and Justin around, later reporting on their activities at some length in The New Yorker. Book length, as it now turns out. Why would Whiteside want to write about them, one wonders? As Twiggy might say, 'I dunno. Ask 'im.'
Review, 1053 words
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