The Sunday Profile: Twiggy

Teenage chic? Been there. Icon for a generation? Done that. In Vogue? Four times this month, actually ...

'Still in Vogue!" writes Twiggy, across a photograph of herself dressed in high-street cream and pearls, in the current fat and lush 90th anniversary birthday issue of the magazine. Actually, she's very much in vogue, since she appears not once, not twice, but four times. First, photographed in the Sixties, by the equally immortal David Bailey, as the "Icon for the Mod Generation". Next, in her present deified role as the saviour of Marks & Sparks, complete with laugh lines and bags under her eyes: icon of the modern matron of the middle shires.

The longevity of Twiggy says something about her own intuition - not least because she's managed to survive without the customary rituals of celebrity self-abasement. Thankfully, so far, she has refused to deposit herself in the jungle or attempt to turn herself into Doris Day in Stars in Their Eyes.

What Twiggy has done is stay comfortable in her own skin. She's been talking to her own generation ever since she was first discovered, aged 16, in Neasden, north London, and splashed across two pages of the Daily Express as "The Face of 1966".

Now, even in the current cringe-making 007 spoof Christmas campaign, in a grey satin dress that has a touch of post-war Utility bridesmaid about it, she flags up an equally potent message - much ignored by the bulk of advertisers and manufacturers. Today's 50-something woman can add pounds and avoid multiple chemical peels and still look as if she's ageing well - at her normal chronological pace. Now isn't that astounding!

Just look at Helen Mirren, Francesca Annis, Judy Dench - and the first of the Big Spenders, Shirley Bassey, the new recruit to the latest M&S advertising campaign launched last week. The French have understood for decades that mutton can taste and look as good as lamb - bizarrely, it's been down to M&S to spread the word here. As a result, as the company revealed last week, its half-year profits are up 32 per cent - the highest for almost a decade.

Twiggy has pulled off this trick before, saying something as different about ageing now as the radically different visual message she previously sent out about youth. Model and fellow M&S star Erin O'Connor, writing about her in Vogue, says, "I'm very inspired by her original pictures. Twiggy defined her whole era and what I like most is that it was not meant to happen. She was the absolute contradiction in terms of what models were supposed to be and she made it work by just being completely herself. It's great doing M&S with her. She's a live wire ... We just sit around and listen to Her Majesty speak."

Her Majesty told one interviewer: "More so than at any time in history, older women are living wonderful, independent lives ... they're financially stable and ready to enjoy an active social life, with or without an other half." It's that spirit that M&S has capitalised on so cleverly.

Of course, the truth about the M&S recovery is that it was the cocoa beans that triggered it, not Twiggy. Food sales went up massively, helped by a staggering 3,000 per cent increase in the sale of Melting Middle chocolate puddings and a gastro-porn television campaign. Still, Twiggy sold a good story.

She was born Lesley Hornby in 1949, one of three daughters, to Norman, a Bolton carpenter, and his wife, Nell. At Brondesbury High School in Neasden, she was known as "Sticks". At 15, she was 5ft 4in and weighed six stone. She was initially turned down as a model - deemed too short, too skinny and too androgynous. "I was a very shy, insecure teenager," she recalled, "That's why I actually thought they'd all gone stark, staring mad."

On the Christmas cover of Honey, soon after her debut, she was pictured with Vidal Sassoon bobbed hair, eyelashes as long as spiders' legs painted on her lower lids, cupid lips, sequin mini-shift (then, it would have sold for about £4.50, now back in fashion, in Vogue the decimal point has slipped a couple of places - it sells at £450); shiny Christmas balls hanging from her ears and her knees no bigger than Adam's apples. She and her dandy boyfriend, Justin de Villeneuve, also known as Nigel John Davies, had created "a look".

It was the year that Time magazine wrote: "In this century every decade has its city - and for the Sixties, that city is London." Barbara Hulanicki, (also back in vogue and Vogue) had opened her first Biba two years earlier. The young were in the money. The average teenage wage was £10: £3 for your keep and the rest to spend on gear. "Enjoy it today, sling it out tomorrow," Harper's Bazaar advised.

Mary Quant designed clothes for girls who, for the first time, had no desire to look like their mothers - with Op Art, and berets the colours of Smarties. She designed expensively, and, also for the first time, the high street copied, piled it high and sold it cheap.

Twiggy was top of the game for four years but stopped when she began "feeling like a trapped bird". She was different, not only for her signature looks but also because of her class. Her peers, such as Jean Shrimpton and Celia Hammond, were posh. Later, in 1981, when she starred in a TV production of Pygmalion, Twiggy was one of the first Eliza Doolittles obliged to learn how to speak with a cut-glass accent rather than to fake dropping her aitches.

She says she's not solely driven by ambition; she certainly has courage - venturing out over the years into areas in which her talent has waxed and waned. In 1971, she appeared singing and dancing in Ken Russell's film The Boy Friend, to win several awards. Twelve years on, she starred in the Broadway hit My One and Only. A brief foray on to the day-time sofa for ITV's This Morning was not so successful.

She gives the impression that her home life is the achievement of which she is most proud. Her first husband, American actor and alcoholic Michael Whitney died of a heart attack when their daughter, Carly, was five (she is now in her twenties and a graduate in animation from Edinburgh University). Twiggy has lived with the British actor Leigh Lawson for 20 years and is close to his son, Ace. She likes cooking and sewing; does Pilates and tap dancing. She is involved with charities, including Age Concern. "I actually feel very ordinary and very down to earth and very normal," she says. "I love being a wife, I love being a mum. I don't feel that different from most people."

A few years ago, Twiggy launched her own skincare range for Asda. She is canny. While 95 per cent of ads are targeted at the under-fifties, the disposable income of over-fifties is 30 per cent higher than that of the young.

"Older models are finally stealing the limelight," she said recently. Then added, "It's about bloody time."Well said, Your Majesty.