Songstress FKA twigs—never one to shy away from going big and bold—models the season’s statement earrings. Our first glimpse of Tahliah Barnett—better known as FKA twigs—in the 2013 video for the single “Water Me” was a three-minute close-up of the then-25-year-old Gloucestershire native’s angelic visage, digitally altered so that her eyes appeared twice their normal size, like a manga cartoon. Ten months later, on the eve of her critically lauded
album debut, twigs released the video for “Two Weeks,” a surrealistic vision of the artist as a giant golden idol enthroned in a vaguely ancient temple—imagine Cleopatra in cream trousers—surrounded by a half-dozen miniature dancing versions of herself. (Her next release—a collaborative film with Google Glass that sent up the chameleon’s ever-blossoming collection of visual personae—was, almost by default, stripped down in comparison.)
Still at the beginning of her musical career—the mere title of her record, LP1,anticipates more to come—twigs, now 27, is already ready for her next chapter. “Work always reflects how your brain is morphing,” she says from the hair-and-makeup chair of Patrick Demarchelier’s Manhattan studio. “And right now is a very morphy time for me.” Her architecturally designed braids and gelled curls have been jettisoned in favor of beautifully tousled dreads, and in addition to playing the biggest concerts of her life, twigs is navigating the practical challenges of her relationship with very-famous-person Robert Pattinson, who will pick her up from the set a few hours later. “Sometimes I really struggle having my picture taken,” she says, and one can’t help thinking of the relentless paparazzi, who at the moment simply cannot get enough of this new anti–It couple.
Part and parcel of the appeal of twigs, whose unique brand of R&B is as ethereal as it is minimalist, is the way she dresses and carries herself, which is every bit as idiosyncratic as her music. With a mother who worked as both a seamstress and a salsa instructor and a stylist best friend (Karen Clarkson, of the London boutique Found And Vision), twigs puts a DIY spin on everything from vintage finds to borrowed couture. When a makeup artist recently singed off twigs’s eyebrows in a bleaching experiment gone wrong, for instance, Clarkson devised a hairstyle of long, braided fringe (embellished with gold beads, no less) that covered up the peroxide catastrophe for the Mercury Prize shortlist announcement later that week. “We had to come up with something,” Clarkson says, “or Cinderella wasn’t going to the ball.” A few weeks later, the singer turned up at the Mercury Prize awards ceremony in a Balenciaga look that, on the runway, was worn as a jacket over trousers but, on twigs’s tiny frame, became a dress. But while innovation may be a chief priority for her, both sartorial and otherwise, elegance is never far behind. “Even if there is a punkness to her,” Clarkson says, “twigs is naturally chic.”
Her beautiful peculiarity seems to stem, at least in part, from the way she surrounds herself with a tight-knit group of creative friends. “I want to learn to tango,” she says, “but I wouldn’t seek it out—I’ll wait to meet someone off the street who could teach me.” That’s not so far off from how she met Derek Auguste, her current movement coach and vogueing specialist, at a New York City nightclub. Now, Auguste says, “she wants to train every day. She’s not just trying to touch on a few aspects of vogueing; she’s trying to get in with the girls.” On the heels of her sold-out show at Manhattan’s Terminal 5 the night before this shoot, twigs and Pattinson attended the Mugler Ball in Astoria, Queens, where twigs vogued down the runway with the best of them, finishing with aplomb in what’s known as a death drop. “You have to give a part of yourself to a particular culture,” twigs says, “rather than just borrow [inspiration] from it or enjoy looking cool because you’re there.” (Rihanna also attended the ball, causing quite a stir, though she didn’t perform.) “Everything you reference, you need to give back to it in some way.”
Dance training is a major impetus for twigs’s imminent move to New York—currently planned for March, when she finishes her tour. And odds are that more dance training will only stoke her creative fervor. “A few years ago I found out that there’s a lot of Gypsy blood on my mother’s side,” she says. “I’m wild in that way—I’ve been brought up to do my own thing.”
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