When 16-year-old Lesley Hornby, the British mannequin identified for her skinny body, freckles, blond pixie minimize and blue eyes fringed with heavy false lashes, was found in 1966 by a vogue editor, her look hit like a lightning bolt.
Twiggy, as she was immediately renamed, was nothing just like the fashions fashionable at the moment — sultry, mature, higher class-coded girls like Jean Shrimpton. She was from a working-class household — her father was a carpenter. At 5-foot-6 she was petite and nearly childlike.
“I didn’t appear like the fashions of that day,” Twiggy, now practically 77, mentioned over espresso final week at Bottino restaurant in Manhattan. “Women from working-class households didn’t change into fashions.”
However a brand new period was dawning within the Sixties; music and vogue have been all about youth, openness and social mobility. Twiggy appeared to embody London’s youthquake, and its mod scene, telegraphing recent vitality and new potentialities.
Twiggy’s well-known face launched a thousand commodities, a advertising and marketing software for cosmetics, garments and lunch packing containers. However her real-life story, which unfolds within the director Sadie Frost’s considerate 2025 documentary, “Twiggy: The Girl Behind the Icon,” which arrives in America this month, continued lengthy after the youthquake subsided.
An Uncommon Movie star Story
It’s straightforward to see traces of the younger Twiggy in her nonetheless youthful face. Her hair stays blond; bangs nonetheless body her blue eyes. And she or he nonetheless goes by the moniker Twiggy.
Getting older doesn’t hassle her. “I don’t spend lots of time interested by what I appear like,” she mentioned. “For those who begin entering into that, about, ‘Oh my God, I’ve received this wrinkle and that wrinkle…’” She trailed off, however her level was clear: She is snug in her pores and skin.
Slightly than flatten herself to suit her cartoonlike standing, Twiggy used fame to discover myriad artwork types over a 60-year profession, together with movie, theater, vogue design, dance and singing, proving gifted in any respect of them.
After 4 years as a mannequin, working with photographers together with Barry Lategan (whose early photographs first received Twiggy observed), Cecil Beaton, Bert Stern, Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton, she moved on to cinema. The director Ken Russell was so impressed together with her that, though she had no appearing, singing or dancing expertise, he solid her because the lead in his 1971 movie musical, “The Boy Pal,” reverse co-stars Christopher Gable, who’d danced with the Royal Ballet, and Tommy Tune, already a Broadway star. Russell despatched her to singing and dance courses, which she plunged into with enthusiasm.
She realized to faucet in a 12 months. “It was tougher for Chris Gable to study faucet than for me, as a result of ballet dancers do all the things turned out,” she mentioned, remembering with amusing that she’d had a bonus on this over her skilled ballet star colleague.
That movie function earned Twiggy two Golden Globes. She went on to star on the London stage and appeared in dozens of movies and tv exhibits. She recorded albums and designed vogue traces. In 1983, she co-starred together with her outdated good friend Tommy Tune in a Broadway revival of the Gershwin musical, “My One and Solely,” which earned her a Tony nomination.
“He’s one other one who modified my life,” she mentioned of Tune. “He at all times takes my breath away. He’s class personified.”
Frost’s documentary exhibits Twiggy dealing with crowds lunging towards her, discuss present hosts leeringly asking about her physique, and even an interview, whereas nonetheless a teen, with Woody Allen, who badgers her with condescending questions, together with “Who’s your favourite thinker?” Twiggy met each scenario with well mannered however agency solutions. “Who’s your favourite thinker?” she asks Allen, beautiful him into silence.
Poised and Protected
What explains such poise? Twiggy’s eyes stuffed as she gestured heavenward and replied, “A hundred percent Norman,” referring to the daddy she adored. “Dad grew to become my rock when Mum would go into hospital,” she defined. Nell Hornby struggled with psychological sickness all through Twiggy’s childhood, disappearing periodically into psychiatric wards, leaving Norman to care for his or her three daughters. (Twiggy was the youngest.) “He stored me type of away from it,” she mentioned. “Protected.”
Maybe much more necessary was the steadfast love Norman confirmed his sick spouse. Twiggy remembers that, when requested why he “put up with Nell,” Norman would merely say, “As a result of I really like her.”
Along with her father, she discovered a protector throughout her early modeling years in her then-boyfriend and supervisor, Justin de Villeneuve, who regardless of his evident peccadilloes, stored her secure. “He sorted me,” she mentioned. “I used to be a child, however no person touched me.”
Twiggy weathered different storms over time, particularly the sudden loss of life of her first husband, the actor Michael Witney, when their daughter Carly was simply turning 5. Fortunately remarried for practically 4 a long time to the actor, author and director Leigh Lawson, she’s a doting grandmother to Carly’s two youngsters and surrounded by adoring mates, a lot of whom determine in Frost’s movie, together with Dustin Hoffman, Fran Drescher (whose present, “The Nanny” was impressed by her friendship with Twiggy), the actress Joanna Lumley, Paul McCartney and Stella McCartney (who designed the cream tuxedo Twiggy wore in 2019 to obtain her damehood at Buckingham Palace).
The day we met she wore a cream shirt, maroon and cream patterned pants by Zara, white trainers and a maroon leather-based jacket from her erstwhile midpriced Twiggy line at Marks & Spencer. “I’m not a giant high-end vogue purchaser,” she mentioned, including: “I can’t put on excessive heels. I hate them.”
Her apparent ease with herself accounts for her ongoing enchantment, to girls in her personal age bracket and even to very younger folks. Nearly all of Twiggy’s fan mail, which she solutions herself, comes, she mentioned, from 14- to 25-year-olds. That is doubtless due partly to the perennial curiosity in ’60s vogue, but it surely speaks additionally to the timeless high quality of that “Twiggy” icon, or as she describes her picture, “this little one who type of sits on my shoulder and by no means goes away.”