The Kate Moss Effect
January / February, 2010
She's more than pretty face. What is it about her that keeps us fascinated?
SHE'S MORE THAN JUST A PRETTY FACE. WHAT IS IT ABOUT HER THAT KEEPS US FASCINATED?
wo or three years ago—trust me, I don't remem- her which—I was standing in the cavernous marble hallway of art dealer Jay Jopling's London mansion when a young woman accosted me. "You're Marianne's friend, aren't vou?" she said. As with the years, so it's become
with names, faces and friendships for me— that's the tyranny of dictatorial Time, with . his savage exile of all those mutinous brain cells to the Siberia of my brain.
Anyway, I looked into the face of this
, young woman, trying to recall who the hell
i my friend Marianne might be, when it
\ dawned on me that she was rather a pretty
1 young thing: a petite figure sheathed in a
M blue silk floor-length dress (it was an eve-
B ning party), gold locks pulled back from
a resolute forehead, a fine-bridged nose
a shade away from being retrousse.
"Urn, yeah," I fumbled, "I suppose I am—and you are...?" The expression on the pretty face
mutated slightly, incredulity doing battle with the beginnings of affront, and as I observed this delightful play of emotions it occurred to me this wasn't simply an attractive young woman but a very attractive one.
"I'm Kate," she said, and hearing the distinctively flat vowels of the outer London burbs, I began to have the glimmering of a positive ID.
"Right, Kate," I said. "Kate...?"
I was surprised to find that not only was I still looking her directly in the face, but I'd become transfixed by it; it wasn't merely a beautiful face but quite possibly the most lovely one I'd ever had the privilege to gaze upon. It was strange, because there was nothing particularly distinctive about this visage if
you broke it down into its component features. It was rather as if the good-looking girl next door had turned out to be a goddess—and then, petrified as Actaeon was upon realizing it was Diana he had seen naked and bathing, I heard the fateful whine:
"Moss. I'm Kate Moss."
I wouldn't want to make too much of this episode, yet there does seem something blissful about my failure to recognize in the flesh Britain's most famous supermodel and arguably her greatest contribution to the global stock of female pulchritude. It suggests not simply cultural amnesia on my part, a crusty insulation to the blizzard of imagery in this, the age of electronic reproduction, but a determination— albeit unconscious—to encounter wen-woman I meet anew, shorn of all that tiresome baggage, the Balenciaga handbags full of fame, the Louis Vuit-ton clutch bags blazoned with name and the Burberry plaid hold-
alls stuffed with cash.
Besides, it wasn't the last time I would fail to recognize Ms. Moss—but more of that later. For now let me state for the record that I was in fact an early Moss adopter. Back in the early 1990s I began to hear from a stylist girlfriend of mine about a young model from Croydon who was set to take the fashion world by storm (and through the modeling agency Storm). We were all hopelessly dissolute at the time, but even so the coinage heroin chic—which was already
being applied to the Moss look—struck us as distinctly outre.
For stateside readers two concepts need to be explained here. Firstly Croydon, which is not so much a South London satellite town as a state of mind. Think suburban, then magnify all suggestions of dullness by the power of a hundred. The notion of Moss as the ultimately divine girl next door is given an earthly grounding in her origin among these serried ranks of redbrick and pebbledash semidetached houses, the daughter of a barmaid and a travel agent. Then there's heroin chic, an expression that came out of a 1987 British government AIDS information campaign that featured a series of scabby waifs engaging in virus-transmissible activities under the slogan "Don't die of ignorance."
It was alleged at the time that kids, finding these posters cool, were tacking them onto their bedroom walls, but I have my doubts. What isn't debatable is that heroin chic fed into the campaign Moss shot for Calvin Klein a few years later. Looking back at those black, white and greige all over images of the model in her late teens and her tiny
panties, I'm amazed at how wholesome she appears, since in the intervening years we've become utterly blase about size-zero and age-Polanski models.
I don't want to get bogged down in the Moss portfolio, because the truth is I've clocked only a couple of her campaigns. One was her hair-flicking prance for L'Oreal. although not because I'm a devotee of the shampoo; it is rather that the line "I declare war on split ends" insistently reminded me—and whichever of my kids I happened to be goggling at the box with—of the preamble to our digital wrestling bouts: "One. two, three, four, I declare a thumb war."
Even dressed up to the nines in the L'Oreal ad. Mossy still looked like the kind of girl who wouldn't mind a thumb war, a tickle and a glass of milk before bedtime. It's tiot a Lolita thing, this—Moss looks her age; it's a certain wholesomeness that against
all the evidence she manages effortlessly to project. Awhole-someness still buarrely intact in this year's Yves Saint Laurent Parisienne ad. which sees the ciitoral rose petals afloat-ing onto her leather bustier as our Katie pleasures herself in a limo, rocking and rolling across Paris to the accompaniment of Depeche Mode.
Not one of those 2 billion magazines the Moss mush has fronted were flogged to me— nor you, I imagine, and it's not we who form the core market for whichever sniellv water.
slap or schmatte she's being employed to Hog this week. But globally, orbiting like a mirror above womankind. Moss reflects back at our wives, our girlfriends, our daughters and even our mothers their dream of being excessively [ beautiful in the way only she is: super-ordinary, to coin an expression.
L'p until 2005, when pictures of Moss honking cocaine were plastered across the front cover ol Britain's Daily Mirrttr newspaper, she had an impressive shtiik going as the J.D. Salinger of the beautiful people: She had never given an interview, and her public pronouncements were either the gnomic utterances
of some catwalk sage or else the sort of sweet nothings we expect to drop out of an empty head. It depended on which way you wanted to take it (and her). All this fed into artist Marc Quinn's desire to create a gold statue of La Mossima entitled simply Siren.
Quinn had done an earlier Moss statue in bronze. He managed to cast her head, but the model— perhaps wisely—offered the limbs of others in lieu of
her own and refuted to he portrayed without her tiny (op and panties. Siren has the Moss-alike looking suitably ataiaxic. her legs tucked behind her golden head, her pudenda on the addenda lo the plinth and the pupils of her priceless eyes burnished minor shiny.
It was a bumper time for British artists making luck-off expensive works. Damien Hirst exhibited /¦><; /.me of (tod. a diamond-encrusted platinum
skull that sported a sales tag of £50 million. I'd handled the skull in a vault in Lou-don's diamond district, Hatton Garden, and a lew months later I got to hell the skinny golden Moss-call, which was stashed in a vault a mile or so away in Goldsmiths' Hall, 1 the (lily ll(j of one of the livery companies \ descended from London's medieval guilds.
At 110 pounds, the hollow 18-karat-gold statue (the largest to he made since antiquity) was coincidentallv the same weight as Moss herself. As someone who has lifted her on to
her plinth. I can attest she's a cold hard hitch who comes apart at a central seam. Quinn and I were at the (.oldsinilhs' I lall to have a that about Siren lor the catalog piece I was writing, and it was an irony not lost on us that the piece— which cost £1.5 million to make—was steadily appreciating in value because all the liquidity was being sucked out ol'the surrounding financial district.
But (juinn's Siren didn't lure all those traders to the rocks any more than Kate Moss's alleged cocaine use tarnished the image of unrestricted consumer greed leading to the great posthoom hangover. II you're looking lor a model (ha-ha) ol recovery Irom an economic crash, go no lurther than Moss, whose four-line statement in the wake of the Mirror revelations was—given her sphinxlike public silence—the equivalent of any other star's tit-beating mea culpa on Oprah. With a judicious parachuting into rehab and a little lie-low for a couple of months, she was back maxing out her hillings
lii-lore I lie nexl year's pret-a-porter shows.
Without wishing to east myself as a major seenester, the behavior that led to Moss's little tabloid trip in 2(10") was already well-known to insiders, and onie she started running with I'ormcr Libertines Irontman Pete Doherty it seemed only a matter of time before she
Mumbled ;md fell. Doherty was a poster boy on the heroin-shabby side dI tilings and seemed bell-bent on dying of ignorance: paparazzi liillowecl them everywhere, and the bet I-hopping, partner-swapping high jinks of Moss and her coterie—dubbed "the Primrose Hill set" alter the tony North London neighborhood where they mostly lived—had become the nation's staple breakfast reading.
Throughout it all Moss remained oddly glowing, like her golden alter ego or some latter-day
Dorian C.tav. So when I sav she comes apart at a central seam. I mean it. There's obviously the shrewd Kate Moss who is very much the architect of her own image and destiny, and there's another Kate who. despite more than averagelv high appetites lor those things in life that can he very good until they turn very nasty, nonetheless commands a fierce loyalty.
And mark this: It isn't sim-plv a loyally owed by her close
friends—the oni
In I lie greenroom I saw a neat-lealurecl blonde I thought was one ofthe lovelies allotted to me by the organizer and hailed her accordingly. "Hi. Ruby!"
"Rubv!" Moss spat—lor indeed, it was she. "I'm no linking Knhv'."
Throughout the evening, under the eyes of hundreds of people. Moss behaved, shall we say. with flamboyant disregard for convention. I shan't go into detail, but while ostensibly part of a sober judging panel she often disappeared beneath Mutable. No one saw fit to censure her. and I'm not about to. From what the mutual friends tell me. she's a charming soul given to cooking them her version of a lull Knglish breakfast alter abandoned all-nighters. It seems fitting that Britain's greatest model should produce a model breakfast. This normally robust repast consists of multiple eggs, bacon rashers, sausages, baked beans and fried bread, but alter the Moss treatment it becomes a bonne bouchc-si/c affair: a single tiny egg. a sole toenail-size piece of bacon and half a piece of dry toast.
Perhaps the last word on Moss belongs lo my wile, herself a keen aficionado ollemale beauty—and not in the manner of a credulous consumer. At the same parly where I first failed lo recognize Moss, my wile had a long chat with her. They were gelling on so well that Moss asked il she could lake mv
wile's number.
"Don't bother." my wile said self-deprecatingly. "We both know you'll never ring it. but il'you like I'll take yours."
When she told me this later I asked eagerly, "And did your Did you take her number?"
"Well." my wile said philosophically. "I wanted to, and I had my phone out to kev it in. but I just couldn't bear to take my eyes away from her lace to look at the keypad."
Believe me. Kate Moss really is that beautiful.
SHE'S GIVEN TO
COOKING HER
VERSION OF A FULL
ENGLISH BREAKFAST.
