The woman in the jade-green suede biker jacket and tartan trousers sticks out her hand. “’Allo, I’m Twig,” she says. The name still sounds funny after all these years, even for those of us who can’t recall a time when we hadn’t heard it. This perpetually effulgent figure was styled “Sticks” by a friend on account of her skinny legs, only for that to morph into “Twiggy” by the time her picture was splashed across the Daily Express, which named her “the face of 1966” when she was 16. Yet it feels stranger still to think of her as Lesley Hornby, the name inked on to her birth certificate 75 years ago.
Twiggy is not one for looking back, she says, but today there is no avoiding it. For one thing, we are joined by Sadie Frost, who has directed a new life-and-times documentary about her. They met when Frost, 59, was a guest on her podcast. “I liked it that parallel things have happened in our lives: modelling, acting, fashion,” says Twiggy. Frost, who modelled as a teenager before segueing into films such as Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula and the joyriding romp Shopping (with her future and now ex-husband Jude Law), adds “raising kids” to the list of shared experiences. Grandchildren, too: Frost has just become a grandmother, while Twiggy has five. “When my granddaughter was six, she walked up to a picture of me in Marks & Spencer and kissed it. Ha ha!”
