The Girls of Their Years

She does not attempt to come on sexy. Her excitement is something else. It is almost pure excitement. It is excitement of the New Style, the New Chic. The press watches Jane Holzer as if she were an exquisite piece of ... radar. It is as if that entire ciliate corona of hers were spread out as an antenna for new waves of style. To the magazine editors, the newspaper columnists, the photographers and art directors, suddenly here is a single flamboyant girl who sums up everything new and chic in the way of fashion in the Girl of the Year. (Tom Wolfe, "The Girl of the Year," The New York Herald Tribune, 1964)

Off the runway, much ado was made of her personal fashion sense — a cuted-up variation on the old New Wave with little hats, suspenders and neon accessories, and Web sites were dedicated to the fetishization of what Anna Wintour referred to as her “uncompromising hair” — the platinum-bleached crop-top emulated by fans around the world. Even if Ms. Deyn’s income did not make the Forbes Top 15 for supermodel earnings, she was increasingly visible as a tastemaker. In 2008, Glamour magazine named her among seven people “Who Will Change Your Style.” (Cintra Wilson, "Of the Moment, And Thinking Ahead" (The New York Times, 2009)

In many ways, Cintra Wilson's Agyness Deyn profile in today's Styles section reminds me of Tom Wolfe, who proclaimed Jane Holzer's Itness in 1964. ("She comprehends what the Rolling Stones mean.") Thankfully — with a helping of Wolfe tongue, hold the exclamation points — Wilson sidesteps the usual celeb-profile fawning:

She comes off as genuinely sweet, sunny and slightly dim, her punkette look the thinnest candy coating over an interior filled primarily with airy, whipped pink goo and nuvo-hippie, gestalt-y wow-ness. But this dimness, I suspect, is strategic. I’ve seen this before; actresses sometimes evade answering questions by obfuscating them in colorful fogs of positive nonsense. It is understandable: actual information limits the ability to be all things to all people, so vagaries protect the brand. But they also result in puzzling answers to relatively simple questions.