When sitting down with Twiggy near the back of a quiet Italian restaurant in Chelsea on a beautiful late-summer day, it is easy to picture the vibrant energy that has followed her for nearly six decades. Outside, patrons are enjoying their lunch on a sunlit terrace, completely unaware that a few feet away sits a woman who fundamentally rewrote the visual language of the 20th century.
Twiggy—who achieved global, paradigm-shifting fame at just 16 years old, becoming indisputably the world’s first true supermodel—is currently in the middle of a whirlwind, high-profile week. Just the previous night, she hosted an exclusive screening party at Sloane’s in SoHo for a major new documentary chronicling her life and career. A stellar guest list featuring cultural titans and fashion royalty, including Fran Drescher, Ellen von Unwerth, Iris Law, and Donna Karan, gathered to pay glowing tribute to her enduring legacy. In a matter of days, she will cross the Atlantic to Los Angeles to host yet another high-profile screening of the film.
Before embarking on this current press trip, Twiggy, now 77, hadn’t visited New York City since before the onset of the global pandemic. Yet, her history with the city stretches back decades, to the very first time she touched down on American soil as a 17-year-old sensation. Back then, she was immediately mobbed by massive crowds of enthusiastic fans upon arrival.
“I landed and they were teenage girls with banners up with my name,” she remembers fondly, reflecting on the sheer scale of the phenomenon that enveloped her youth. “I came in after the Beatles, so I became part of the British Invasion… I was one of the invaders.”
Long before she became the most recognizable face on the planet, Twiggy was born Lesley Hornby, raised in suburban London. Her journey into the cultural zeitgeist began modestly when she started sneaking out to mod clubs at the age of 13.
“I was a school girl, so I was only allowed out on a Saturday night. I had a strict curfew. I had to be home by 10:00,” she says, describing the tight boundaries of her working-class upbringing. “We’d go to a club in another suburb of London. The thing about mods is you wore the same things. It was a uniform.”
Twiggy and her tight-knit group of friends would eagerly emulate the older girls, adopting the established look of the era: a “gray pleated skirt that came just below your knee, Hush Puppies shoes, and a navy blue nylon raincoat,” as she recalls with absolute clarity.
At the time, she was working as a Saturday girl at a local hairdresser, diligently saving up her meager tips so she could afford to shop at the storied London boutique Biba, which was then cementing its place in fashion history.
“It was like our church, going to Biba,” Twiggy says, emphasizing the almost sacred reverence she and her peers held for the brand. “Every fourth week, we’d run down to Biba during our lunch hour. You could get a dress for two pounds and it was brilliant.”
It remains a fascinating twist of fate that Twiggy spent her spare teenage hours working in a beauty salon, considering it was precisely at the hands of a hairstylist that her entire life trajectory shifted overnight. In 1966, Leonard Lewis, widely known as Leonard of Mayfair, gave Twiggy her iconic, revolutionary crop.
“I didn’t want my hair cut,” she confesses, looking back at the hesitant teenager she once was. “I was sitting in this posh salon in Mayfair and I was too shy to say no. Thank God, because if I hadn’t had my hair cut, none of this would have happened.”
Renowned photographer Barry Lategan captured the striking boyish crop on film, and the resulting photograph was proudly hung up on the wall of the salon. There, it caught the discerning eye of Deirdre McSharry, a prominent fashion journalist at the Daily Express. The publication quickly heralded Twiggy as “The Face of ’66,” and from that exact moment onward, her career blasted off into the stratosphere—though those initial, historic snapshots remain among the most famous and defining images of her entire portfolio.
The journey toward immortalizing this incredible life on film is a story in its own right. Sadie Frost, the director of the new documentary Twiggy, explains how the project unexpectedly came together. Frost, who famously returned to formal education in 2019 to pursue a master’s degree in film production, was heavily promoting her directorial debut—a celebrated documentary about the pioneering fashion designer Mary Quant.
As part of her press rounds, Frost appeared as a guest on Twiggy’s own podcast, Tea With Twiggy. During the recording, Twiggy asked her what creative endeavor she planned to tackle next.
“At that moment, I realized I didn’t have a job,” Frost says, recalling the spontaneous genesis of the film. “I’d been working for three years on Quant and I hadn’t thought about the future because I was so consumed with that. And it just spurted out: ‘Oh, I don’t know. Let me do a documentary about you.’”
Initially, Twiggy was hesitant. Over the decades, she had been approached numerous times by various filmmakers and producers, always choosing to back away for different reasons.
“It’s a big commitment to agree to have somebody put your life on the big screen,” she notes.
However, she didn’t immediately shut Frost down. Instead, she suggested that they continue the conversation off the air. Prior to recording the podcast episode, the two women had occasionally run in similar social circles in London, but they had never properly gotten to know one another. True to her word, Twiggy went out to lunch with Frost the following week.
“We got on really well,” Twiggy says. “I liked the fact that [Frost] was a woman. She’s been a model, an actress, a designer. She’s been in the public eye since she was about 15.”
Because Frost had walked a remarkably similar path, there was an immediate, unspoken understanding between them. “I thought, she’ll understand where I’m coming from and what I’ve lived through.”
“By the end of lunch, she said yes,” Frost recalls.
The ambitious project ultimately took three years to complete from conception to final cut. The resulting documentary features a rich tapestry of insightful interviews with prominent figures from across the entertainment, fashion, and cultural industries. Among them are heavyweights such as Sienna Miller, Stella McCartney, Brooke Shields, Edward Enninful, and Sir Paul McCartney.
Frost explains that she carefully selected her interview subjects based on the core themes she intended to explore throughout the film, as well as who could offer the most authentic perspective on those topics.
“I knew Sienna Miller—being young, blonde, a model, an actress—could really relate to Twiggy,” Frost reflects. Additionally, aside from being a close personal friend of Twiggy’s in real life, Sir Paul McCartney shared her distinct working-class roots, providing a vital socio-economic context to their meteoric rises in 1960s London.
The film also makes extensive use of rare archival footage capturing teenage Twiggy at the height of her initial fame, a research process Frost describes as one of the most rewarding aspects of making the movie.
“There’s this authenticity and naivety and innocence,” Frost observes. “You really had these very upper-class, middle-class models who were very put together. And then Twiggy came along and just blew that out of the water.”
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One particular archival clip, which has recently been making the rounds across various social media platforms, features Twiggy being interviewed by a visibly condescending Woody Allen, who presses her to name her favorite philosophers. Twiggy appears visibly uncomfortable for a moment before deftly turning the question right back around on him. Caught off guard, Allen has no ready answer.
Some contemporary viewers may be genuinely surprised to discover that Twiggy’s legendary modeling career actually lasted for a remarkably brief period—only five years in total. She officially retired from full-time modeling in 1970, successfully pivoting toward a diverse, enduring career in acting, music, and other creative pursuits.
When asked how she balanced the overwhelming focus on what Twiggy is globally best known for with everything she accomplished afterward, director Frost points to the longevity of her artistic output.
“You are remembered for the moment you became famous a lot of the time, then you might have a career for 40 years after,” Frost says. “लेकिन then she went on to win Golden Globes. She went on to do albums, she had a TV show.”
Frost’s core mission as a director was to ensure modern audiences become fully aware of all the remarkable milestones Twiggy achieved long after her initial modeling breakthrough.
“There’s a bit of Eliza Doolittle in me,” Twiggy admits candidly when discussing the trajectory of her career—a comparison she is uniquely qualified to make, having famously portrayed the iconic character in a 1981 television adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s classic play Pygmalion. “I came from the wrong class. I would never have gone to a modeling agency and they wouldn’t have taken me because I was too small, too thin,” she says, reflecting on the strict parameters of the fashion industry during her youth. “What happened to me shouldn’t have happened.”
Asked what advice she would offer to that teenage version of herself who stepped out into the world completely unaware of the historic cultural tidal wave about to hit her, her response is instantaneous.
“‘Be brave and go for it,’” she replies with a smile. “But I think I did.”
Twiggy is available on DVD and VOD.
