Jacket and blouse: Celine by Hedi Slimane. Jewellery: Bentley & Skinner. Tights: Versace. Slippers: Manolo Blahnik. Photograph: Campbell Addy/The Guardian

I do wonder about the pole dancing. She’s done it before, in the video for Fukk Sleep, an A$AP Rocky song she guested on, where it was more straightforwardly man-pleasing. But twigs has always explored her sexuality in her work and tells me, “My sexuality tank and my creativity tank are the same tank, which is great, but also quite frustrating.” If she’s feeling sexually confused or uninspired, then her work is off; but equally, if her work is good, then she feels strong and sexual. In the Cellophane video, she is unbelievably sexy, but her needy lyrics – “Didn’t I do it for you? Why don’t I do it for you?” – play against this.

“Well,” she says, “I think that, in society, as a woman, you can be this beautiful creature and you want to be that for yourself, but there’s also a part of you that is doing it for the approval of the opposite sex. And that can lead you to feeling, ‘Am I good enough? Have I done enough?’”

If it seems a bit extreme – twirling around a pole in the full splits position just to get a man to think you’re great – well, twigs has started asking questions about such things. She watched the great Kathy Burke TV series All Woman, which she loved, and she’s been noticing how women often do the “emotional labour” of a relationship, what she calls “learned behaviour”. To her chagrin, she is often referred to in terms of her boyfriends (since Pattinson, she’s been linked with another actor, Shia LaBeouf, and is dating Reuben Esser, fashion editor of Another Man magazine). It irritates her, but she is also conflicted about relationships in general.

“I feel like I’ve been indoctrinated to feel like when I’m with a man, things are better,” she says, “regardless of whether they are or not. I’ve been made to feel like, if I’m with a man, then I’m doing the right thing, I’m validated, I have a tick to my name. And even though I don’t really believe that, because I’m intelligent and I understand things, it’s somewhere inside me.”

Twigs grew up in Cheltenham as Tahliah Debrett Barnett, the only child of an English-Spanish single mother from Birmingham, who’d moved out to the countryside to give her daughter a better life. And it was, twigs says; she loved being outside, she enjoyed nature. The walls and ceilings of her room were painted dark blue, with stars and moons on them.

As a child, she had a great imagination – “It was on fleek!” she says – and often mixed up daydreams and reality: until she was about 12, she sort of believed she could fly and hang in the air, simply by jumping off the stairs. Clever and hard-working, she got a scholarship to a private all-girls Catholic secondary school, which she enjoyed while feeling entirely different from everyone else. There were no other mixed-race students. Her stepfather, who moved in when she was little, was one of the few black people in her life.