2024-01-13 12:00:00
Kate Moss made it onto front pages worldwide with her perfect face and became an icon of the 90s. The British woman turns 50 on Tuesday (January 16). Moss was still a teenager when she was discovered by an agent. Did she worry about her appearance as a child? “Definitely not,” Moss once said in an interview. Neither she nor her mother thought she was particularly photogenic.
As a 16-year-old, Moss landed on the cover of The Face magazine. Photographer Corinne Day showed her with a freckled face, a feather crown and no top. She didn’t actually want to take off her top, Moss said in the BBC program “Desert Island Discs” in 2022. She suffered, but the pictures changed her career. She also doesn’t have any good memories of recording with Mark Wahlberg for Calvin Klein. Did she feel treated like an object? “Yes absolutely.
Moss’ voice sounds a bit rough, deeper than you would think, surprisingly anyway. She speaks with a British accent, saying “Telly” when she’s talking about television and “Wellies” when she means rubber boots. In the BBC program she presented songs that are important to her. “A Whiter Shade of Pale” by King Curtis, for example, David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” and Van Morrison’s “Madame George”. A selection that supports Moss’s image of effortlessly cool. Photos sometimes showed her with a cigarette, looking pretty skinny (“Heroin Chic”).
For designer Wolfgang Joop, Moss has created a new type. “She didn’t have everything that the supermodels had before,” he told the German Press Agency. For example, at around 1.70 meters, she was too small. At the time, Kate Moss contradicted the common style, such as that of Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista. “She was more of a grunge type.”
Wolfgang Joop © IMAGO/Thomas Bartilla
Unfortunately, his team missed the opportunity to hire Moss for a shoot at the beginning of her career. “She still had brown hair and looked like a 70s teenager. And I was really impressed by her photogenic face.” However, a well-known photographer advised against it at the time, citing Moss’ size. “But there’s hardly one that has lasted this long. It’s simply an icon.” She retained her attitude, her charisma and her charm.
Moss also accompanied a new generation of photographers. Mario Sorrenti, for example, who photographed her for a Calvin Klein perfume. “This Calvin Klein commercial actually gained cult status because of her.” Moss was once in a relationship with Sorrenti, as well as with singer Pete Doherty and actor Johnny Depp.
Moss rejected the accusation that she was glorifying thinness. “I think I was the scapegoat for other people’s problems,” she said on the BBC programme. She was never anorexic and never took heroin. When photos appeared in 2005 that appeared to show Moss doing coke, she apologized. The fact that the reporting only focused on her was hypocritical. “Because everyone I knew did drugs.”
When she was once asked in a video by Vogue magazine what she missed most about the ’90s, she replied: “The freedom of being without cell phone cameras.” Today she says she rarely goes to bars, but rather likes to be at home. She lives in the countryside of England. Likes old sitcoms, meditates in the morning or lies under the moonlight at night, as she told the Sunday Times newspaper.
Her daughter Lila is particularly important to her. Moss founded her own agency and signed Lila there. “Watching her build her modeling career takes me back to the ’90s when I was just starting out,” Moss wrote in Vogue. “But I know things will be different for her.” Lila knows that she can say no and she has the right people around her. “I made sure of that. And let’s be honest, she’s a lot more sensible than I was back then. I mean… thank God. Ha!”
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