It all started with a razor-sharp pixie haircut. Sixty years later, Twiggy is still a fashion icon – and she never stops marvelling at how her life changed the day she walked into a smart London hair salon and came out with a ’do she hadn’t even wanted.
“I was this shy 16-year-old from a working-class suburb,” recalls the 76-year-old with a shrug.
“Leonard Lewis was like a film-star hairdresser at the time, and he came over and introduced himself. “He asked if he could cut my hair. I wanted it to remain the way I had it, in a bob. Thank God I let him do that cut because otherwise, I wouldn’t be sitting here talking about it!”
What followed was, of course, extraordinary by anyone’s standards. Within weeks, Twiggy had transformed from a girl next door into fashion’s newest sensation. With her impossibly slight frame, huge blue eyes and even bigger personality, she arrived on the scene like a pocket hurricane – and never left.
Proud of his work, the hairdresser had a photo taken of his young muse before she left the salon. Days later, a newspaper fashion editor spotted the photo on the salon wall. In what seemed like a flash, Twiggy – real name Lesley Hornby – was featured in the newspaper as “the Face of ’66” and she never looked back.
The girl behind the icon
Within a month, she’d appeared in Vogue magazine, and within a year, she’d modelled everywhere from the US and France to Japan. But the girl whose mum was a factory worker and dad a builder never lost sight of who she was.
“I’ll tell you how naïve I was,” she chuckles.
“The first time I went to Paris in 1966, we were in a restaurant and all the photographers were ordering wine, and the waiter said to me, ‘What do you want?’ And I said, ‘I’ll have a Coca-Cola,’ And he sneered and said, ‘What vintage, mademoiselle?’ But for me then, Coke was posh!”
A documentary about her life, simply titled Twiggy, is full of such stories. Because she was discovered at such a young age, Twiggy needed her parents’ permission to leave school.
“It could have been a flash in the pan, but my dad said, ‘If I deny you this chance, you might end up really resenting me,’ which I wouldn’t have done because I loved him. “But I think it was a wise thing to say. He said, ‘The only way I’ll let you do this is if you are always accompanied because I know about those photographers!’ He’d been a master carpenter in the film business, so he knew.”
Dealing with judgement
One thing Twiggy’s father didn’t predict was how quickly people would judge his quick-witted youngest daughter based solely on her appearance.
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“There’s always been that thing that models are stupid,” she says.
At 17, Twiggy sat down for an interview with filmmaker Woody Allen in front of a live studio audience. It didn’t take long for her to realise she had walked straight into a trap.
The Oscar winner asked her, “What are your views on serious matters? Like, who’s your favourite philosopher?”
She turned the question back on him, saying, “I haven’t got one. I don’t know any. Who’s yours?”
To which Woody had no answer himself. Looking back, says Twiggy, “He was trying to make me look stupid. I didn’t plan to give him some attitude. I was in a panic. I was so humiliated because I didn’t know any. “If I was the age he was there, in my thirties, I would never have behaved like that towards someone who was only 17.”
From modelling to acting
After four years in the fast-paced world of modelling, Twiggy turned her attention to acting. She won two Golden Globes for her starring role in The Boy Friend and earned a Tony Award nomination for her performance in the stage musical My One and Only.
Despite the predictions of her ’60s modelling rival Jean Shrimpton that her career would be fleeting, every decade that goes by sees Twiggy still in the limelight. The twice-married mum of one earned a damehood in 2019 for her contributions to fashion, the arts and charity, taking the title Dame Lesley Lawson rather than Dame Twiggy.
Twiggy still feels touched when young women reach out to tell her how much she means to them, more than six decades after she transformed the fashion world and defined the Mod era. Sometimes they even send old photos for her to autograph.
“Some of the photos aren’t even me,” she laughs.
“They happen to be a blonde girl with spiky eyelashes that they’ve got from the internet. I put a big sticker on them saying, ‘Not Twiggy!’”
Twiggy is streaming on Neon.
