From Marilyn Monroe to Twiggy-RESEARCH

Marilyn Monroe often claimed to be blasse about fashion and clothes, but she was extremely strategic about what she wore. Few other celebrities have displayed such genius for carefully orchestrating their image. She singlehandedly created her iconic look - platinum blonde hair, inviting red pout and killer dresses to accentuate her perfect hourglass figure.Monroe dressed for men. Her outfits only ever had one purpose - to show off her body which she understood was the key to her success.While her blonde tresses, beauty spot and red lipstick are often cited as key elements of her style, her look was actually more complex. Great intelligence and thought went into its creation. Use the following lesser known Marilyn Monroe style facts to understand how she used clothes to her advantage.Over the decades our ideal body shape and size has changed from the voluptuous screen goddesses such as Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe, Bridget Bardot and Ursula Andress to the size zero celebrities of today. If you look back to the 1940s and 50s the average dress size was a 12-14. Now, in 2010, the ideal shapes of our screen icons have changed in a very worrying way towards size 8 and 00s of Victoria Beckham, Kate Moss, Paris Hilton, Madonna and Cheryl Cole.
Four years after Marilyn Monroe’s death in 1962, a British model named Twiggy ushered in the trend that a fashion model – and by extension any desirable woman – must be a size 0 or 2 (in the old days, size 3 or 5) in order to be fashionable or as it has been portrayed in countless films and magazines, desirable. Thin is in. You can never be too rich or too thin. The clichés go on and on. Sophia Loren and Raquel Welch, hour-glass actresses who predated the trend, survived and flourished but by the mid-1970’s, thin blonde Farrah Fawcett represented the aspired to look. That look has not been challenged in almost forty years. Even Madonna, who may have begun her career with heavier thighs, dutifully lost the weight as she ascended the heights of fame in the late 80’s/90’s possibly just to stop hearing about her added pounds from the press.

Twiggy: I Wanted To Look Like Marilyn Monroe

NEW YORK — Back in the Mod '60s, when Twiggy conquered London and fashion changed forever, the waif of a teen with huge eyes, a boyish bob and long legs craved the glamour and curves of a different icon."Whether you're thin, fat, small, dark, blond, redhead, you wanna be something else," said the world's first boldface supermodel. "I wanted a fairy godmother to make me look like Marilyn Monroe. I had no boobs, no hips, and I wanted it desperately."What she wanted was all around her: fuller-figure models with names nobody remembers, many of them middle-class or upper-crust older girls biding their time before landing husbands. Absent any of that, what Twiggy had was extreme youth, a thirst for fashion and triple-layered false eyelashes that fed her right into the decade's social revolution alongside the Beatles and Pop art

The Era	The Look of the Day for Women
1800's	A large body is a sign of health and fertility. Corsets narrow the waist and enhance the bust.
1890's	Actress Lillian Russell at 200 lbs. or 91 kg. is the most celebrated beauty of the time.
1910's	Paris designer creates slim sheath dresses, declares that breasts are “out”.
1920's	Era of the flat-chested, slim-hipped flapper. First dieting craze of the 20th Century begins.
1950’s & 1960’s	Voluptuous full figured shapes of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield are popular.
1967	British model Twiggy (5’6 or 168 cm. and 91 lbs. or 41 kg.) arrives on the scene – and the diet industry explodes.
1970’s & 1980’s	Models gradually become taller, thinner and begin to show toned muscle definition. Breasts make a fashion come-back.
Early 1990’s	Waif-like figure of Kate Moss presents a wasted “heroin chic” look and a pre-teen body.
Late 1990’s	Tall, very thin models with no visible body fat and muscles highly toned by hours of working out. Large breasts remain in style – but are rare in this body type without the help of breast implants.
The average North American woman is 5’4 or 163 cm and 140 lbs. or 64 kg. Models in the 1970’s weighed 8% less than the average woman. By the 1990’s models weighted 23% less.
2000 and beyond	Real bodies come in all shapes and sizes. …Set your own trend!!!