Their pictures appeared on all kinds of merchandise, they modelled for Jean Paul Gaultier and Chanel and their Playboy covers sold out in less than two weeks. When Hugh Hefner spotted them on a traffic-stopping Sunset Boulevard billboard, the Barbi twins went stratospheric.
Growing up, the girls wanted to be nuns or veterinarians, but a modelling job for Sears catalogue at the age of seven propelled them into a career in fashion magazines including Seventeen. They told it had been “difficult to tell other countries to surrender their animal abusing ‘cultures’ and ‘traditions’ without being labelled a racist.” Their politics are unsurprisingly mixed: they are pro-gun and pro-life, but see climate change, veganism and gay rights as top priorities.
Their mother, a former Miss Ohio, was a progressive who supported charities, while their father was a strict Republican who taught them to shoot and ride tractors on his ranch. The twins, goddaughters of Dusty Springfield, came from a strict religious family. The twins beat bulimia and wrote books about their new healthy vegan lifestyle. Their Green Teabagger Politiclone blog (tagline “Giving bimbos a bad name”) accuses the government of “making us look fat”, and they have protested against animal testing with placards that read: “Experiment on blondes, NOT monkeys. Magnotta was later convicted of dismembering a Chinese student in Montreal and mailing his limbs to schools and political party offices.īut perhaps the most surprising thing about the provocative double-act - with their plumped-up pouts and curvaceous figures - is their self-deprecating, wacky sense of humour. The identical sex-symbols were even at the centre of an international manhunt when they recruited porn star Ron Jeremy to help them trace murderer Luka Magnotta, notifying police of the kitten-killing videos he had posted online. The glamorous, doll-like sisters are militant vegan animal rights activists, who have campaigned for veterans with post traumatic stress disorder and started their own political party. THE Barbi twins were the ultimate Playboy icons of the 1990s, pneumatic blonde pin-ups who appeared on the magazine’s best-selling covers, created a world-famous brand and became 13-year-old Prince William’s first crush.īut Shane and Sia’s story is far more interesting than that of the average bunny.