"This is the new British girl. Observe her. She is a novel phenomenon."
So begins the introduction by Anthony Haden-Guest - a glorious outpouring of praise and adoration for these girls that epitomized a particular time, place, and moment in history. Haden-Guest explains that who this girl is: "She is Loyal, also Fickle, Obstinate, Gentle, Suspicious and Trusting. Also Sharp and Feckless, Realistic and Fantastic beyond belief. Just as in the horoscopes, which she never fails to read, make your character diagnosis, and it will seem to fit. Until you diagnose the opposite, and that fits too."
"There are no rules, only exceptions. Except that the British girl is suddenly the most attractive, the most desirable, the most startling girl in the world. This is a rule, and an exceptional one.
She is a new animal, a shock genetic mutation, and she has appeared everywhere, like a new model of car, or an epidemic, or the flowers in the Spring."
"But there is, of course, a reason for everything. A new animal must be observed in its environment, and especially in this case when the British girl has exploded into a radically altered environment, which she has created, or which created her, or whatever, and which has become known as the London Scene. The Scene ... an exhausted phrase now, an adman's phrase like Image. The Image of London, the London Scene, both phrases over-used, almost to death, but always resurrected, because they are irreplaceable. There is a new way of life, and these girls are part of it.
The new girl belongs to this moment in time, and only this one."
Pattie Boyd
"Pattie Boyd always looks on the brink of being startled by something utterly fantastic. The eyes and mouth are assuming delicate saucer shapes. The blood is about to rush from a milky and tremulous face. She has already been startled, by a precipitous success as a model, and she startled everybody else by marrying a Beatle, George Harrison, the lean one who is trying to master the Indian sitar. What more utterly fantastic things can life hold?"
Charlotte Rampling
"Apparently without trying much, she is maintaining an impressive rising graph, from toting a guitar around Spain, through modelling, to acting. There was a flash of a scene in The Knack and quite a slice of Georgy Girl - two crucial movies of the new London - and now onwards. In Georgy Girl she portrayed a Swinger, 'a really vile and hard sort of woman' in her own words. But everybody calls her Charly."
Sue Murray
"Sue Murray is a model, and one of the bright lights of the post-Shrimpton wave. She is one of the moxt successful in Britain, or, for that matter, the United States, where she works constantly. Why? John d Green says that she doesn't have to work at it - she just stands there. She is the perfectly natural girl."
Title: from "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)" (Michael Jackson)
