It’s a Monday afternoon and I’m asking Kate Moss why she thinks she’s stayed at the top for so long. ‘I don’t consider myself a rule breaker,’ she tells me. ‘I just follow my instincts and there’s absolutely no agenda. It helps that I still really enjoy modelling even after all these years.’
Kate is at her modelling agency in Soho, London – the Kate Moss Agency, that is, launched in September last year. She’s wearing black jeans, a plain T-shirt, a Saint Laurent blazer and Alaïa boots. ‘These are the basics that I always reach for,’ she says, ‘and after so many years I’ve realised what I feel comfortable in – there’s nothing worse than feeling restricted or conscious of what you’re wearing.’
No surprises there. But what is striking for a supermodel soon to turn 44, who has embodied the phrase ‘style icon’ for almost three decades, is that she wears very little in the way of make-up and, I soon realise, has a refreshingly low-key attitude to beauty.
Born and raised in Croydon, Kate was discovered in 1988 at the age of 14 by Sarah Doukas, the founder of Storm Management, while at New York’s JFK Airport with her father. But it was when late photographer Corinne Day shot a series of images of her for The Face magazine in 1990 that her look signalled a change in what the fashion industry wanted.
The pendulum swung away from the curvy, Amazonian models of the late ’80s (think Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford) to the waifish grunge look epitomised by Moss in the early ’90s. Kate fronted a Calvin Klein underwear campaign alongside actor Mark Wahlberg (then the rapper Marky Mark); while John Galliano booked her to open his spring/summer 1990 show, describing her as his ‘rough little diamond’.
