The resurrection of Kate Moss: from stormy loves and drugs to being a symbol of style again
It was the eve of the nineties, the time when no one was shocked if the sexualized girl in the jeans graphic was not old enough to be there. Katherine Ann Moss was 14 years old and was returning from a vacation in the Bahamas when a Storm agency scouter discovered her at John Fitzgerald Kennedy Airport in New York. She did not look like the models of the moment, she was not voluptuous, nor did she have the curves of Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer, or Naomi Campbell. Neither does the stringy body of Elle McPherson. Naturally, Kate had the figure of the child she still was, and a disturbingly exotic face: angular, high cheekbones, her heart in her mouth, and wide-set eyes like a helpless lamb. They weren't going to take long to sacrifice her.
Her parents, a former bartender and housewife, and a travel agent, had separated a year earlier, when she was 13. She had been born on the outskirts of London on January 16, 1974, had a younger brother and was one more student from Riddlesdown High School, where she would soon be photographed by Vogue as the new style icon of the time – “half tomboy, half feminine, entirely beautiful” –: for the industry it did not seem a problem that she was a teenager, on the contrary It was something to note. Legend has it that when Corinne Day did those shots, in '93, Kate was chatting in the hallways with her old teachers, hiding her cigarette, like a rebellious girl.
By then she had been working as a model for five years, but she was already one of the best paid in the world, since the same photographer, Corinne Day, together with the stylist Melanie Ward, had presented her –at only 16 years old– as the image of “ Third summer of love”, in The Face magazine. “I see a 16-year-old girl now, and asking her to take her clothes off would look very weird. But they told me, if you don't do it, we're not going to call you back. So I locked myself in the bathroom to cry, and then I went out and did it. She wasn't comfortable topless: she hated my boobs! I was flat as a board and had a mole on one. That photo where I'm running on the beach I'll never forget, because there was only one man, the hairdresser, and I made him turn around," Moss said in one of the few great interviews he gave in his entire career, with Vanity Fair, in 2012.
Her style was born with a name, she was grunge, the "heroin chic" , also at the behest of Day. Again, nobody cared to associate a girl with a hard and deadly drug. Moss says that she never used heroin, but that the photographer was fascinated by the Lou Reed song. "It was about glamorizing frailty and thinness, and Corinne loved that look," Moss told Vanity Fair. And I was that skinny because I kept doing shows, I worked so hard. In those early days, I would stop at a bed and breakfast in Milan, where I would come from work all day and there was nothing to eat. I went to work early in the morning, and there was no food either. Nobody took you to lunch when I started. I remember that once Carla Bruni took me, who was divine with me. But, in general, nobody saw to it that I was fed. I was never anorexic, or I wouldn't have been able to work the way I did." That was the other name with which the (unhealthy) trend was baptized: the “anorexic style” was in fashion, and the face – and body – of that style, was her.
She didn't even enjoy shooting the commercial with which she rose to international fame, in 1992, when Herb Ritts photographed her for Calvin Klein, also topless, just wearing the brand's jeans and briefs that were all the rage in the 90s, and with the now actor and then rapper and model Marky Mark. "I was 17 and I had a nervous breakdown," she also told in that interview that she revealed for the first time her years of silent suffering. I didn't feel myself. I hated having to wrap my legs around that muscular guy. I couldn't get out of bed for two weeks and I thought I was going to die. I went to the doctor and he prescribed Valium, but (photographer) Francesca Sorrenti, thank God, she said, 'You're not going to take that.' It was just anxiety, but nobody takes care of your head, the pressure to do what you have to do is tremendous. I was seriously very young, and I had to work with Steven Meisel –the top photographer in the era of star photographers– and do my job.”
Between 1994 and 1998, Moss had a highly publicized courtship with Johnny Depp , and is one of the few ex-partners of the actor who retains a good memory of who would later be accused of gender-based violence, precisely because with him she did feel cared for, at least for for a while, even though he also had episodes with her that were then considered part of their aesthetics. That they lived partying, always drunk, and also drugged, or that they destroyed hotels in their fights – he ended up arrested after an argument at The Mark in New York; she was banned forever from the Hotel de Cap in Cannes, after one of her last encounters – it was part of what the paparazzi and tabloids adored in them: they spoke of a “coke-addicted romance”.
When they met, in January 1994, Moss was 19, and Tim Burton's fetish actor, 30. He had just separated from Wynona Ryder, with whom he thought he would be forever – he even had her name tattooed on his back–, and also losing his best friend, River Phoenix, due to an overdose. And she was revered in London, but she was terribly lonely: “Nobody had been able to take care of me and while he was with me, Johnny did. I believed in him and in what he told me. I could ask him 'What do I do?,' and he would tell me. And when we parted ways, I missed him so much. He had lost the person he trusted the most. It was a nightmare. Years and years of crying, oh, how many tears!”
She would later meet the editor of the cult magazine Dazed and Confused, Jefferson Hack, with whom she had her daughter, Lila Grace, in 2002. When they broke up, she met a boyfriend who would bring her much more trouble than Depp, the bad boy of music Pete Doherty, whom she, paradoxically, made him give up heroin. She was with him in a London recording studio when she was filmed snorting what was supposed to be cocaine, in 2005. The footage was on the front page of the Daily Mirror and all the tabloids announced the end of her career, although they did not stop chase her. She was 30 years old.
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In the midst of the scandal the fast fashion brand H&M terminated the contract as the image of her collaboration with her friend Stella McCartney, and Chanel said that she would not renew hers. Burberry also dropped it from her campaign. She in total she lost more than US$5 million. She seemed like a lie to her: the very ones who had shaped her into the face of her addict style, now turned their backs on her.
While she apologized publicly and entered a rehabilitation clinic in Arizona – she had already done so in 1998 in a clinic in London for what was said to be due to stress and fatigue – however, she understood that she was not alone. Her story had unleashed a critical gaze towards those who singled her out: if Kate was a model, perhaps it was not her alone, but her time. At the same time, a much more serious scandal than the violation of her privacy was uncovered in Great Britain: cocaine was also common currency in parliament and in all spheres of power.
And then there were several who defended her. First it was his friend, the well-remembered designer Alexander McQueen, who closed a parade with a T-shirt that read “We love you Kate” and paraded it as a hologram at Paris Fashion Week, and then a series of celebrities, from Sharon Stone to her ex and father of her daughter, Jefferson Hack; passing through the artists Lucian Freud – who painted her pregnant, in 2001 – and Stella Vine, who made an exhibition of her with her portraits to honor her. Naomi Campbell also declared in public that everyone was acting badly towards her , and today canceled Mario Testino – a photographer who used to be a muse – said that Kate had done nothing wrong, and W magazine put her on the cover. As a brooch for her, John Galliano's Dior – another controversial figure in Fashion, but a faithful friend of hers who never abandoned her – made her star in her campaign.
And so things began to change: the cosmetics brand Rimmel London chose her as the face of their “Recover” foundation, something that fit her as well as CK jeans: it was a product that promoted its “anti-fatigue” properties. , what better than your perfect skin after so much partying to test its virtues? Nikon, Roberto Cavalli, Bulgari, Stella McCartney, Longchamp, Agent Provocateur, Virgin Mobile, and, of course, Calvin Klein followed. A year later, in November 2006, the industry would redeem herself by giving her the Model of the Year award at the British Fashion Awards. She was back.
In 2007 she signed a million-dollar deal with Topshop to make a capsule collection: it was a resounding success. She also launched her perfumes, in partnership with Coty. And although the media continued to call her "Cocaine Kate", she became a unique case: no one else had tripled her earnings after a similar scandal.
She looked healthy and the owner of a new style that she also imposed, the Boho chic , when she married Jamie Hince, the guitarist of The Kills, in July 2011 at St. Peter's Parish in Gloucestershire. They would separate five years later, but then everything was happiness. She was dressed, of course, by John Galliano. In her landmark interview with Vanity Fair she says that she was terrified and that she asked the designer to "give her character." Galliano gave him the key: “You have a secret, Kate. You are the last of England's roses, hide under that veil. When he picks it up, he's going to meet your rampaging past."
Today, at 48, and with a photographer and aristocrat boyfriend, the German Count Nikolai von Bismarck –with whom she plans a wedding that will make her a countess–, that last rose, the last of the supermodels, continues to make history. The painting in which anonymous artist Banksy updated Warhol's Marilyn with her face is going up for auction in London this week with a starting price of $246,930. The parallelism is evident: it is not only beauty, but the reification of it, that unites the greatest known sex symbol with the greatest style symbol of the last three decades. With one huge difference: Kate survived.
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