When I speak to Twiggy, we’re sitting near the back of a quiet Italian restaurant in Chelsea. It’s a beautiful late-summer day, and people are enjoying lunch on the sunlit terrace.
Twiggy—who achieved global fame at just 16 years old, becoming arguably the world’s first true supermodel—is in the midst of a busy week: last night, she hosted a screening party at Sloane’s in SoHo for a new documentary about her life, where guests like Fran Drescher, Ellen von Unwerth, Iris Law, and Donna Karan paid her tribute. In a few days, she’ll be in Los Angeles, hosting another screening.
Before this trip, Twiggy, now 77, hadn’t visited New York since before the pandemic. The very first time she touched down here, however, she was 17 and immediately mobbed by fans.
“I landed and they were teenage girls with banners up with my name,” she remembers. “I came in after the Beatles, so I became part of the British Invasion… I was one of the invaders.”
Before becoming the biggest model in the world, Twiggy, born Lesley Hornby, was brought up in suburban London, where she began going to mod clubs at 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. “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 friends would emulate the older girls, wearing the established “gray pleated skirt that came just below your knee, Hush Puppies shoes, and a navy blue nylon raincoat,” as she recalls.
Then a Saturday girl at a hairdresser, she would save up her tips to shop at the storied London boutique Biba. “It was like our church, going to Biba,” Twiggy says. “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’s ironic that Twiggy spent her spare time working in a salon, because it was at the hands of a hairstylist that her life changed. In 1966, Leonard Lewis, also known as Leonard of Mayfair, gave Twiggy her iconic chop. “I didn’t want my hair cut,” she confesses. “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.”
