The high priestess of cool herself is turning the big 5-0
Why are millennial women so obsessed with Kate Moss? (Spoiler: it's because she's the best)
Kate Moss is celebrating a half a century on this earth on Tuesday.
The nineties waif turned rock chick turned unassailable global icon of cool, the face (and body) that launched a thousand trends, will turn fifty on the island of Mustique while tabloids and broadsheets back in Blighty churn out endless pieces of content attempting to explain the lasting appeal of Croydon’s most famous export.
I love Kate Moss. I love her like I love no other celebrity. If I ever appeared on mastermind, my specialist subject would be Kate Moss and I doubt I’d get anything less than full marks. I love Kate Moss so much that one Christmas I made a collage of her for my sister (another fan, albeit less ardent than I am). I have three books about the model, I follow Instagram accounts dedicated to her style and I don’t think I’ll ever get bored of looking at that strangely ordinary yet extraordinary face.
Amid all the fanfare surrounding her milestone birthday, I have been trying to work out why I love her so much. And why so many other millennial women do too - because I’m not alone in my adoration. The reason Moss has been on the cover of Vogue magazine more times than any other supermodel is because she shifts copies. Brands hire her because she sells their wares. But why? There are other cool girls. There are other preternaturally beautiful women pouting from billboards. What’s so special about Kate Moss?
A bunch of things, I think. There’s the all-important mantra of ‘never complain, never explain’ that Moss borrowed from the Royals and has followed assiduously. By zipping her lip, Moss has established a rare and precious commodity in our social media, reality television age: mystery.
Then there’s the fact that she seems to be having a lot of fun a lot of the time. She doesn’t bear the tinge of sorrow and isolation that other comparably famous women seem to carry. More often than not, she looks like she’s having a great time, going after life with gusto. Think of all her birthday parties - the 21st at then-boyfriend Johnny Depp’s LA hotspot The Viper Room, the F Scott Fitzgerald-themed 30th bash that allegedly devolved into an orgy in a Claridges’s suite, the 34th which saw her skipping through the streets of Camden in a floaty star-covered Chanel jumpsuit with a gold star painted on her face a la David Bowie - who, by the way, was a friend.
Finally there’s her strange relatability. Unlike the other supers who seemed to have won a genetic lottery far beyond the reach of mere mortals, Moss’s undeniably fabulous looks don’t seem so very out of reach. Her smile is snaggle-toothed and untouched by a Hollywood dentist, her breasts are small, she stands at just 5ft7in tall - and yet somehow, put it all together and she dazzles in a way that leaves her Amazonian colleagues looking a little… boring. Then there’s the relatable way she lives her life. She was chucked off an easyJet flight for helping herself to her own vodka back in 2015. At the time, the response was: but why was Kate Moss on an easyJet flight? But that’s part of her magic. She owns vast homes in North London and the Cotswolds, runs around the Vatican with new friend Kim Kardashian, but she’ll still hop on an easyJet flight home from a spa holiday in Turkey with her mates, have her clothing range at high street store Topshop and advertise a three quid Rimmel eyeshadow by murmuring ‘Get the London look’.
But the key to Moss’s appeal, I believe, is her defiance. Moss marches to the beat of her own drum. To see a woman in the public eye, unashamedly pursuing her own happiness and refusing to be bullied by the media among others into living her life in a certain way that they find palatable, well… you can’t help but look on in admiration.
It started early on when Moss, a skinny twig of a thing at the start of her career in the nineties, found herself accused of promoting heroin use, eating disorders and even, thanks to one risque Vogue shoot which saw her looking sad standing around in her knickers, paedophilia. Then-president Bill Clinton condemned the aesthetic, calling it ‘destructive’ and a ‘glorification of heroin’.
I’m not particularly interested in defending heroin chic, but what nonsense to accuse a teenaged Moss of all those social ills. Moss, displaying backbone even back then, didn’t shuffle away from the spotlight nor did she issue a hand-wringing mea culpa that she didn’t mean. She simply blocked out the noise, kept booking jobs, strode down catwalks and did her thing.
Oh, and while striding down those catwalks, she was around six inches shorter than all the other models. Even her looks were a kind of rebellion - as Naomi Campbell hilariously said when recounting the time she and Moss met with Fidel Castro in Cuba (a meeting that cost the magazine they were shooting for, Harper’s Bazaar, a £20k fine for violating a ‘trading with the enemy embargo’). According to Campbell, Castro saw a fellow revolutionary in Moss - ‘He knew that Kate started the revolution for smaller models,’ she explained.
In 2005, Moss weathered the most damaging scandal of her career. She was snapped surreptitiously chopping up what looked like cocaine and sniffing it in a recording studio with her then-boyfriend Pete Doherty - and looked impossibly glamorous while doing so, of course, in shorts with her long legs curled into knee-high boots. The pictures were published on the front page of the Daily Mirror, she promptly lost almost all of her contract and the hypocrisy was astounding. Moss, as a model, was known - and booked - for her ‘edge’. Suddenly, she was too edgy. The fashion world is hardly known as particularly cleancut. Speaking in her defence, Robbie Williams claimed that he had actually taken cocaine with the journalists so outraged by Moss’s actions.
‘I think the media have got a lot to answer for. We’re talking about a woman who has never harmed anyone or hurt anyone and who has never pretended to be anyone she isn’t. Some people in various media groups who I have personally taken cocaine with are now talking about her and saying she shouldn’t do it.
‘I have done cocaine with these people.’
And really, looking back, supermodel does cocaine with musician boyfriend in recording studio doesn’t exactly sound like front-page news.
But again, Moss refused to stop marching. Yes, she did skulk off for a 28-day stint in rehab (mainly because she had no other choice if she wanted to keep modelling) but before long she was back to falling out of North London pubs and clubs, back with Doherty, back to being unapologetically herself. And listen, do I think this was the healthiest and happiest time of Moss’s life? No. But do I believe that a woman has the right to live her life how she wants to without being bossed around by people who somehow believe they have the right to tell her what to do? Yes.
And I think that’s Moss’s appeal. Even now that she appears to have embraced sobriety, crystals and meditation, she is still marching to the beat of her own drum. Her raspy Croydon accent hasn’t metamorphosed now she’s sauntered to the top. She’s given no sit-down tell-all interview apologising for her wild days. In a recent interview, when a journalist tried to ask her if she’s had any tweakments, she hurried her along: ‘Next question’. Moss won’t lie about the work she’s had done but she won’t list it off for the approval (or not) of the public either. She’ll do her own thing, thanks, and that’s why I love her. She’s how I, and I suspect most other women of my age, wish we could live - unapologetically and unashamedly ourselves.
The late Karl Lagerfeld, distilled Moss’s appeal.
‘What she projects, everyone would love to do if they had the courage. Girls want to look like her and they want to behave like her. Kate has the courage to be 150 per cent herself.’
Long live La Moss! Happy 50th birthday you courageous beautiful admirable being and here’s to the next 50 years.
And that’s it from me this week. Thank you for subscribing to my Substack. It means the world to me. If you are so inclined, feel free to click on the heart below or share the piece with someone who may enjoy it. See you next week! xxx
Inspiring. Thanks Iss