Penelope Tree

Penelope Tree was born into a rich, influential, dysfunctional British-American family in 1950. According to online sources, she was very intelligent and could get her way around New York when she was eight. Her first photo-shoot was at thirteen by Diane Arbus. In her early teens, she would go adventuring to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez concerts. When her family found out, she was sent to boarding school. At seventeen, she was "discovered" by Diana Vreeland at one of Truman Capote's Black and White Balls. Her family disapproved of a career in modelling, as they did four years before. But Penelope Tree had had it with her family life and dropped her plans to study English Literature at University and instead moved to London and into the photographer David Bailey's flat.

Penelope Tree is supposedly the Ultimate Sixties It Girl, the one who started Flower Power. She stood out from the other models at the time because she had her own personal style i.e. she was pretty Indie Indie. She was also apparently something like new York's representative to the Swinging Sixties (in London). Although she doesn't like to think of herself as an icon, I say that she is indeed an icon of the Sixties as she carried forward the whole "vintage dress-ups" look. I think that what made her such a fashion legend is that the way she dressed, did her makeup, carried herself and thought of herself were all one. For example, she felt like an "alien" (note: a negative thing) and did her make up to express herself as one. (And for a joke, guys, I tried to do my makeup like that in Year Eight. Fortunately I have no photographic records.) Ironically, I think the way Penelope Tree fully completed her "character" showed her as pretty classy, too. What an Indie character.

Penelope Tree and David Bailey
Unknown photographer
http://theesotericcuriosa.blogspot.com/2010/10/tree-squared-shaking-penelope-trees.html

At Truman Capote's Black and White Ball
Unknown photographer
http://theesotericcuriosa.blogspot.com/2010/10/tree-squared-shaking-penelope-trees.html

Unknown photographer
http://photos.lucywho.com/penelope-tree-photos-t285402.html

Unknown photographer
http://photos.lucywho.com/penelope-tree-photos-t285402.html

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So anyway, she was a very insecure and emotionally confused person at the time and had been suffering image issues for a number of years. She was very young and inexperienced but people took her as very mature. Then she had a scarring acne break-out, ending her career and the crumbling relationship with David Bailey. I read a story about her being caught with cocaine in a drug-bust. The police held her overnight, as they refused to accept that she was a famous model or of rich parents. Her reflection in an interview was that "In a way, I was stripped of my identity completely." So she travelled the world on the little money she had left and moves to Australia with her first husband.

Penelope Tree then spent many years of her life exploring spiritual paths. In the Eighties, she discovered Buddhism with the aid of the Dalai Lama. And she was released from continuation of the suffering of the past thirty or so years of her life. At a time when "people of the Sixties" were burning out, she was strengthened. An article written in 2008 says he was working in an organisation called Lotus Outreach International, founded by her Buddhist teacher, helping street-children in India. The organisation was also working in partnership with grass-roots women's projects helping give girls the opportunity to go to school. In Thailand and Cambodia, the focus was on sex-trafficking; doing things like teaching sex-trafficked girls new skills, educating communities about it and buying bicycles for girls to minimize the risk of being raped on the way to school.

An Indie in the Indiest sense of the word.

http://theesotericcuriosa.blogspot.com/2010/10/tree-squared-shaking-penelope-trees.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/03/celebrity.women