From surviving scandal to hard partying: How Kate Moss maintains her star status
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Every age throws up its own handful of icons. More than just celebrities, these are the figures that personify a cultural moment. For a long stretch of recent British history, Kate Moss has been such a symbol.
Rising to fame in the dying days of overblown Eighties glamour, with its statuesque, big-haired supermodels, the waif-like girl from Croydon heralded a change in the zeitgeist. A model, a muse and a style inspiration, she was also something else: one of just a few people who helped define the spirit of the Nineties – an era of grungy hedonism and cool insouciance.
While others’ stars burn brightly for a while, then fade, Moss has managed the rare feat of reaching the cultural stratosphere and remaining there for decades. Surviving scandal and her own hard-partying lifestyle, her image has never grown dated.
Today, as she turns 50, we look back at her life so far and ask those who know her the secrets of her success.
Born in Croydon, south London, to parents Linda, a former barmaid, and Peter, a former airline employee, Moss is not one for romanticising her background. It “wasn’t easy”, she once said of her early years, in which she would hang around the local Surrey Street Market with her friends. She has a younger brother, Nick, a half-sister, Lottie, and attended Ridgeway Primary, a state school. Her parents were to divorce when she was in her early teens.
Her future career was not, it seems, one she guessed was possible. When asked by presenter Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2022 whether she was aware of her looks growing up, she replied: “No, no. Definitely not.”
Moss’s mother appears to have shared this lack of awareness, telling her daughter, “I don’t think you’re very photogenic,” when Moss was scouted in her teens.
A certain humility stayed with her. “One of the things I admire the most about her, aside from her incomparable style, beauty and range, is that she has never lost a sense of who she is at her core,” says Edward Enninful, global creative and cultural adviser of Vogue. “This is something which is so rare in our industry, and which gives her her unmatched status as a genuine fashion icon.”
Others also hint at her lack of airs and graces. “She is the least entitled person I have ever met, which is remarkable,” says her friend Daphne Guinness, the musician, fashion designer and heiress.
“Kate is one of the most loyal, kind friends I have made in the fashion industry,” says Nicola Clarke, creative director at John Frieda Salons and Moss’s long-time colourist. “She is also one of the most inclusive. Her door is always open, so different people from all different walks of life are welcomed.”
Moss was 14 and at New York’s JFK airport when Sarah Doukas, the founder of Storm model agency, discovered her. Doukas had a particular goal in mind: she says she wanted to give opportunities to those who were “not obvious model types”. (Kate, at 5’7’’, is famously shorter than the average catwalk model.) “I felt strongly then that the modelling industry needed to be challenged, and we needed to represent dynamic individuals who had much more of a multi-dimensional impact,” Doukas says. “Those with talent, a great personality, charisma, and a strong work ethic were very attractive to me. In the early days, shorter girls were not given many opportunities. But I could see the potential in Kate, and over the 28 years we represented her, she grew to become a model of exceptional talent and ability, and a globally recognised icon.”
Doukas sent her to do a shoot with a young photographer called David Ross at his flat in Earl’s Court, west London, on a cold October day in 1988. She turned up alone, and a day early, having travelled from Croydon. He told her to return the next day.
“I took pictures on the roof of the building,” Ross recalls. “She didn’t really know what to wear. At one point I gave her a black silk shirt and asked her if she wouldn’t mind putting it on. She was trying to be very accommodating.”
But even then, she did not present like a complete ingénue. “She had a look in her eye that you’d see in a lot of teenagers, but it doesn’t mean they’re going to be able to bring it out in front of a photographer. She was quite capable in that regard and I thought, ‘OK, you’re giving me something to work with here,’” says Ross. “She didn’t fit the heavily stylised Eighties mould at all, but was about to help usher in a rebellious new look that was almost punkish.”
In 1992, Ross spotted a Calvin Klein advert on an enormous billboard in New York. It featured the actor Mark Wahlberg and…didn’t he recognise the girl beside him? “I thought, ‘Wow, she made it,’” he says of Moss.
“Wow” was not an uncommon response to the rising star with the striking look that would become known as “heroin chic”. Glen Luchford, a photographer friend, first met her in the offices of The Face magazine, the cover of which she graced in July 1990, grabbing the attention of the industry.
“I had one of those Hollywood rom-com moments when the room disappears and wind machines start blowing and she’s walking towards me bathed in golden light,” he says. “When I composed myself I said to Corinne [Day, the photographer who shot her], ‘Who the f*** is that?’ She laughed. ‘She’s Kate and she’s from Croydon and yes she has a boyfriend’.”
What was so special about her? “I think what separated Kate from the others was her combination of urban comprehensive school personality and her Garbo-esque features,” says Luchford. “She was gobsmackingly beautiful and funny as hell. Can’t beat it.”
She first appeared in British Vogue in January 1993, shooting her first cover for the magazine two months later at the age of 19. “London style…London girls,” ran the cover line. Moss was definitively it.
As Moss’s modelling career soared, so did her public profile. By 1994 she was dating the Hollywood actor Johnny Depp, becoming half of one of the Nineties’ most famous “it couples”. They were reportedly introduced at New York’s Café Tabac, when she was 20 and he was 31, and were together until 1997.
Moss was by now a style icon in her own right, with her trademark boho fashion style, cigarette in one hand, bed-head hair, a “so what?” kind of expression; Cool Britannia made flesh.
If her relationship with Depp was tempestuous, it was also one that gave Moss something that may previously have been missing. “There’s nobody that’s ever really been able to take care of me,” she told Vanity Fair in 2012. “Johnny did for a bit.”
Following her split from Depp, she moved into another celebrity orbit, becoming a key member of the so-called Primrose Hill set, arguably the most fashionable circle in Britain for some years.
While she has always given little away, largely avoiding interviews, she inspired great affection among those who worked with and became friends with her.
“A wonderful friend,” says Charlotte Tilbury, the beauty entrepreneur.
Guinness agrees. “She is loyal to a fault and she has the most mischievous sense of humour,” she says. “She is also so brave. My admiration for her has never changed.”
In 2001, Moss started dating Jefferson Hack after he interviewed her for his magazine Dazed & Confused. Their daughter, Lila Grace, was born in 2002 and Moss became a devoted mother.
Moss had already done a spell in rehab at London’s Priory clinic for “exhaustion” in 1998, but her 30s were when her edgy lifestyle truly threatened her career. Temporarily, at least.
Her relationship with the messy former Libertines frontman Pete Doherty from 2005 to 2007 kept her frequently in the tabloids. Heroin chic was one thing, but Moss was reportedly adamant that Doherty should quit the drug.
This stipulation wasn’t enough to keep her out of trouble. She was 31 when grainy images of her appearing to take cocaine at a recording studio in West London were published on the front page of the Daily Mirror. The fallout was devastating: she was swiftly dropped by brands including Chanel, Burberry and H&M. Her friends rallied around, but Moss felt she was being publicly scapegoated for widespread drug-taking.
“I felt sick and was quite angry,” she told Desert Island Discs, “because everybody I knew took drugs. So for them to focus on me, and to try to take my daughter away, I thought was really hypocritical.”
She did not face criminal charges, and her daughter was not in fact taken away, but she did make a public apology.
If the episode looked like a serious blow at the time, she managed to ride out the storm, and in 2007 launched her first Topshop collection. Were any proof needed of her enduring popularity, the queues outside the high-street stores suggested her image had made a strong recovery.
The power of this image has been almost unparalleled in modern times, influencing many in the world of fashion and beauty, and beyond it. “Kate is the ultimate beauty chameleon and has been my inspiration from the very start of [my] brand,” says Tilbury. “People were always asking me for my beauty secrets behind the looks and trends that I would create especially for her… For me, there really is no one like Kate. She is the ultimate style icon.”
Moss celebrated her 40th birthday with a party attended by a guest list of famous friends, including Sadie Frost, Nick Grimshaw, Stella McCartney, and Naomi Campbell. But this was to be the decade that Moss embraced cleaner living. Apparently leaving behind her rock ’n’ roll days, she has espoused today’s trends of wild swimming, meditating (including in the garden of her Grade II-listed Cotswolds home) and teetotalism.
In 2022, she launched her own wellness brand, Cosmoss, telling Harper’s Bazaar last year: “I still like to have fun, but I also like to look after myself.”
“She’s amazing, she’s doing really well,” confirms her DJ friend Fat Tony (real name Tony Marnach). “She’s come into her own at 50. It’s something to behold.”
Like few others, she has both moved with the times and defined the times she has lived through, inspiring not one but several generations. Her beauty, like her star power, is undiminished by the passing of the years. “As luminous as ever,” ran Vogue’s verdict, this time last year, on its most prolific cover girl. “It’s difficult to see how one could ever tire of looking at photographs of Kate Moss.”
Indeed. Few female icons compare. Madonna, perhaps. Or Monroe.
“No one will ever be able to emulate [Kate] in the same way that no one will ever be able to emulate Marilyn Monroe,” says Ross. “There will never be another Kate.”
But her friends are certain, too, that she still has more to give. “She’s a very clever and astute businesswoman so can probably do anything she wants to,” suggests Fat Tony.
Enninful, for his part, predicts a future that’s even better than her past. “From where I am standing,” he says, “at 50, Kate is just getting started.”
