Fashion: After the Twig, the Tree?

• Share

Her mother calls her "Legs," which is, after all, as good a nickname as any for a girl whose 5-ft. 10-in., 105-lb. body is supported on what appear to be stilts, moored at the bottom to size 8½ feet. With a physique like that—and an oval face with fathomless, huge brown eyes to go with it—it was perhaps inevitable that Penelope Tree, 17, should emerge as the brightest new model and the likely successor—at least conversationally—to Twiggy.

Penelope, daughter of wealthy English Businessman Ronald Tree and former United States Delegate to the United Nations Marietta Peabody Tree, likes being a model because it is fun. Says she: "I've met people I love whom I probably would never have met otherwise, and I think the camera is the newest and most exciting implement since the paintbrush." Besides, although the gesture is scarcely necessary, modeling will allow her to pay her own way through Sarah Lawrence College, where she is a freshman. "It's an easy way to get money," says Penelope.

Kooky Doll. It has certainly been easy so far. "I met Dick Avedon at a party last February," explains Penelope, "and he asked me to do some test shots." The result is a striking 14-page spread of pictures by Photographer Avedon in the current Vogue, which exposes Penelope's charms in—among other outfits—a partially unbuttoned pants suit, a hip-revealing dress by Rudi Gernreich and thigh-high fun furs. But no matter what the rig, Penelope animates them all with her special gamine charm and kooky doll features.

"Ever since she was born she has had this style of her own; she has never had to copy anybody," says her approving mother. British Photographer David Bailey, whose early pictures of Jean Shrimpton helped launch her career and who recently shot Penelope for London's Sunday Mirror, concurs. "She's really weird," he says, "almost a caricature of a model. She is a completely original-looking girl, and that is such a nice shock these days."