A kooky, ethereal sense of style

Article from the Guardian UK

Penelope Tree has both a name and a face that are hard to forget. Yet for the best part of the past 35 years she has done her damnedest to stay out of the spotlight. During a brief, heady period at the end of the Sixties this American-born model encapsulated the style of the times. Eyes as lustrous as they were round, cheekbones on which you could balance a cup and saucer, a kooky, ethereal sense of style that both epitomised the mood and was all her own. When John Lennon was asked to describe her in three words he is said to have replied: ‘Hot, hot, hot, smart, smart, smart!’ For a while, when David Bailey was her boyfriend and there were front covers for Vogue in her modelling book, she was the It girl in a decade crowded with other so-called It girls with memorable monikers, from Twiggy to Cilla.

‘I was with this photographer whose great love was female beauty and I no longer fitted the bill in any way,’ she recalls. ‘I went from being sought-after to being shunned because nobody could bear to talk about the way I looked.’ There is a tendency to look back at the late Sixties and early Seventies as a halcyon time of free love and swirly skirts, bare feet and sexual liberation. Tree remembers it differently. ‘I think of the Sixties as being every man for himself,’ she says. ‘There wasn’t the therapy culture that there is now and there was a huge amount of abuse of alcohol and drugs. But nobody thought it was terribly odd. It was perfectly fine to be tripping down the King’s Road. It was acceptable to behave quite strangely and talk as if you came out of a Beckett play.’

~ by mentalimaging on August 5, 2008.