Kate Moss, the supermodel who outlived the image the 1990s made of her

Kate Moss

Photo: Walterlan Papetti / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 16, 1974 Addiscombe
Occupation	Model
Awards	British Fashion Awards, Model of the Year · British Fashion Awards, Special Recognition Award

The final look of Demna’s first show for Gucci belonged to a woman who had not walked for the house since Tom Ford ran it. Kate Moss came out in a backless gown cut low enough to show a logo thong, and the room in Milan reacted the way rooms have reacted to her for most of her adult life: as if the picture arriving down the runway were older and stronger than the person carrying it. That gap, between the face the fashion business invented and the woman who has spent decades deciding what that face is allowed to sell, is the real story of Kate Moss.

She did not come from the business. Moss grew up in Croydon, in the south London suburbs of Addiscombe and Sanderstead, the daughter of a barmaid and an airline employee who divorced when she was thirteen. She went to Riddlesdown High School in Purley and worked local shop jobs before anyone thought to photograph her. The discovery story is famous because it is so unglamorous: Sarah Doukas, founder of the Storm agency, spotted her aged fourteen at JFK Airport in New York, on the way home from a family holiday in the Bahamas.

Katherine Ann Moss, born on 16 January 1974, was sixteen when Corinne Day photographed her for The Face in a shoot titled “The 3rd Summer of Love”. The black-and-white pictures, styled by Melanie Ward, presented her as an unknown teenager rather than a finished model, and Day herself called the result “dirty realism”. Next to Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer and Naomi Campbell, who were built like athletes and paid like film stars, Moss looked like somebody’s flatmate. That was the point, and it made her the anti-supermodel of the decade.

Calvin Klein understood the commercial value of that ordinariness before anyone else. After a 1992 campaign alongside Mark Wahlberg, Moss shot her first solo campaign for the brand in 1993, and the stark Calvin Klein images of 1996 turned her frame into a public argument in the United States. The press called the look heroin chic, and President Bill Clinton spoke out against the trend. Her answer, given years later, sounded more tired than defensive: “How many times can you say ‘I’m not anorexic’?”

In September 2005 a British tabloid published photographs of Moss apparently taking cocaine. H&M dropped her from its Stella McCartney campaign, Burberry pulled its campaign and Chanel let her contract run out. Alexander McQueen took his bow in a T-shirt reading “We love you Kate”, and the following March he placed her in the finale of The Widows of Culloden as a ghostly illusion floating inside a glass pyramid. The Metropolitan Police dropped the case in June 2006 for lack of evidence. A year after the photographs she had signed 18 contracts for the autumn-winter 2006 season, and that November the British Fashion Awards named her Model of the Year. The scandal that was meant to finish her ended up proving how little the industry could do without her.

From there Moss became something closer to a subject than a model. Lucian Freud painted her nude in 2002, while she was pregnant with her daughter, and the canvas sold at Christie’s in 2005 for £3.93 million. Marc Quinn cast her in 18-carat gold for Siren, a 50-kilogram statue shown at the British Museum in 2008. She has fronted British Vogue some 30 times, and in 2007 Time put her on its list of the world’s 100 most influential people. At the same time she turned attention into product: a Topshop collection that went on sale in 225 UK stores in May 2007, reportedly for a £3 million fee, a book with Rizzoli, Kate: The Kate Moss Book, in 2012, and, much later, a party capsule for Zara designed with her longtime stylist Katy England in November 2024. In 2016 she founded the Kate Moss Agency, whose clients include Rita Ora, and in 2022 she launched Cosmoss, a wellness and beauty line.

The canonised version of Moss, the girl who never explained herself, is also the part that has aged worst. Silence protected her through 2005, but it left her image to do the talking, and for years that image sold thinness to teenagers who had no stylist and no Storm contract behind them. In a 2009 interview with Women’s Wear Daily she called “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” her motto. The line was attacked for encouraging eating disorders, and she later said she regretted it. When she finally sat down with Lauren Laverne on Desert Island Discs in 2022, the story she told was less about cool than about exposure: a teenager on early shoots where, as she put it, they played on her vulnerability, in a scene where, by her own account, everybody she knew took drugs. The heroin-chic debate had treated her as the cause. Her version made her closer to the raw material.

That same year she broke a long silence about Johnny Depp, her partner from 1994 to 1998. Testifying by video link for about four minutes in his defamation case against Amber Heard, she said Depp had never pushed her down a flight of stairs in Jamaica; she had slipped, and he had helped her. It was the most direct public statement she had made in decades.

Lately Moss has started shaping her own record. She is an executive producer of Moss & Freud, James Lucas’s film about the months of sittings for the Freud portrait, with Ellie Bamber playing Moss and Derek Jacobi as the painter. It premiered at the BFI London Film Festival in October 2025 and opened in British cinemas on 29 May 2026. Three months earlier, on 27 February, she had closed Demna’s debut Gucci show in Milan, and she then fronted a Gucci campaign with Emily Ratajkowski shot by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott. In September Hunter made her the face of its 170th-anniversary campaign, built around a reissue of its original tall wellington and openly nodding to the boots she wore at Glastonbury in 2005.

Moss married Jamie Hince, guitarist of The Kills, in July 2011; they separated in 2015 and divorced the following year, and she has since been with the photographer Nikolai von Bismarck. Her daughter Lila, born in 2002 to the editor Jefferson Hack, is now a model herself. She now lives in the Cotswolds.

The Hunter campaign running this winter rests on the same bet brands have placed on her since Corinne Day: that a photograph of Kate Moss still looks as if it was taken a second before she decided whether to cooperate. At fifty-two, she is the one who decides when that second ends.

Tags: fashion, Kate Moss, models, gucci, Calvin Klein, Corinne Day

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