As the supermodel celebrates her 50th birthday on 16 January, Polly Vernon contemplates exactly why she has enthralled us for so many decades
Kate Moss turns 50, which can really mean only one thing : time to consider ever ything she is, ever ything she means and everything she’s worn; all of which I’ll attempt without once deploying the words ‘icon’ or ‘iconic’, because they’ve been used to abstraction lately, literally to the point of meaning nothing at all, though that’s also a shame, because if anyone is – Kate Moss is.
I’d love to be able to tell you precisely when I first became aware of her. Love to tell you how I spotted that 1990 Corinne Day The Face cover shoot of her, aged just 16, in a feathered headdress (looking like the embodiment of sweet, sunny, summer) and also in a pink vest and pants surrounded by fairy lights (looking like the embodiment of cool, careless, glamour). That I gasped at her incandescent loveliness, realised instantly I was gazing at the future of – not just supermodel-dom, but: the broader cultural moment! That I popped the mag in Perspex because I recognised it as a collector’s item – and Moss as a star.
But I did not. All I can tell you is there was a time I’d never heard of her – then a time when she was everywhere and everything , a touchpoint, an invaluable, unfailing reference on style and lifestyle, the clothes I wanted to wear and the thrills I wanted to pursue. A glittering , incontestable force; a reason to feel good about being British, because she was, which made the rest of us cooler, naughtier, wilder, more glamorous, more fun, purely by association. A founding member – ringleader, even – of the Primrose Hill set, the unutterably beautiful crowd of models, actors and musicians who lived in London’s most picturesque postcode, a set that also included Oasis’s Gallagher brothers, Noel and Liam, Liam’s wife Patsy Kensit, Jude Law and then-wife Sadie Frost, and who, between them, established the pace for everything gorgeous and decadent and fun in late ’90s London.
Kate was ground zero on the hottest gossip in town, the most frantic speculation; who was she dating , where and when, and what was she wearing while she dated them? The rumours ran wild and unfettered and only ever ser ved to build on her glorious mystery, not to mention her capacity to sell her every look, to anybody. For example : was she really told off by the management of the Hotel du Cap -Eden-Roc for wearing a bikini in the hallways and trashing the room she shared with then-boyfriend Johnny Depp? And: what really happened at her The Beautiful And Damned-themed 30th birthday party, the January 2004 one hosted at Claridge’s, to which she turned up with spiral curls, in a full-leng th midnight blue sequinned gown once worn by Britt Ekland to the premiere of The Man With The Golden Gun?
