It’s difficult to even describe, as an outsider to British culture and celebrity, what Kate Moss means to Great Britain. Like, she’s one of the most iconic British people in the world right now. She’s arguably the most famous British model of all time. She’s been well-known, beloved and gossiped about for more than two decades. There has barely been a month in 20 years when Kate isn’t somewhere, doing something or covering some magazine or walking some runway or part of some scandal or being discussed in some way. And throughout it all, she barely ever speaks in public. Finding a quote from Kate Moss is like finding the Holy Grail.
So, she covers the May issue of Vogue UK. Guess how many times she’s covered British Vogue? 37 TIMES. Seriously. That’s practically twice a year for 20 years. Kate got the cover this time to… like, pay homage to fifty years of the Rolling Stones. That’s what the Union Jack-flag photo is all about, it’s an homage to the famous photos of Mick Jagger draped in a Union Jack. Still, why not put Mick Jagger on the cover? No, they had to use Moss. Again. For the 37th time.
Meanwhile, did you hear that Kate is leaving her long-time modeling agency? She was discovered by Sarah Doukas of Storm Models when she was 14 and she’s been with Storm ever since. Kate is 42. So… nearly 30 years. And she’s done.
Kate Moss has left Storm Models, the agency to which she has been signed since she was first discovered by its founder Sarah Doukas in JFK airport aged 14, the company confirmed to us this morning.
“After a successful 28 year relationship, Kate is moving her business in house, and we will continue to maintain an active involvement in our on-going deals for her,” read a statement from the agency, which is responsible for the fashion careers of hundreds of major fashion models including Cindy Crawford, Jourdan Dunn, Liu Wen, Behati Prinsloo and, until recently, Cara Delevingne. The agency does, however, still have one Moss on its books in the form of Kate’s little sister, Lottie.
Moss – who has established herself as a shrewd businesswoman in recent years with many collaborations and additional ventures to her modelling – will, moving forward, manage the majority of her modelling commitments herself, collaborating with the agency on an ad-hoc basis. The move, however, is said to be amicable.
If this was anyone else, I might think that the model was pissed that she wasn’t getting consistent work in her 40s. But this is Kate Moss and she still works all the time. I’ve heard that she still has plenty of offers for advertising and magazine work and she can pick and choose what she does. So what’s this about? Her divorce? A new phase in her career? I have no idea.
Photos courtesy of Craig McDean/Vogue UK.
I simply do not see her appeal.
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I didn’t used to, but I do now.
She’s highly photogenic, but I’m told quite common and a bit on the trashy side in person. I’m just mad at her for looking like she does at her age whilst having lived a terribly unhealthy lifestyle! It’s just not fair! She smokes and drinks and does (did?) lots of drugs, and still she has had one of the longest lasting and successful modeling careers of any of them!
I think Naomi rivals her in the most famous British model of all times.
With a lot of these supermodels I never understood why they were so famous ( like, Cindy Crawford is sooo basic to me), but with Kate I totally get it. She just has that captivating something that looks amazing in photos.
Cindy Crawford fits what was the accepted standard of the day. She was originally marketed as baby Gia ie a younger version of the model Gia Carangi who was a huge model for a minute until drugs + AIDS did her in.
If you compare that model, there is scarcely a difference between models from the Cheryl Tiegs through to Cindy. In it’s own way, it was similar to currennt preference for East European faces.
CC was nothing like Cheryl Tiegs. I’m old enough to remember both eras, and it really was a sea change from “natural” corn-fed 70s beauty to the more grossly sensual appeal of Cindy C. If Naomi Wolf coined the term “beauty porn”, Cindy Crawford personified it.
Chelsea, you may see a difference, but i do not.
Styles changed between decades, so Cindy was photographed differently, but asthetically, not that big a difference between them. They were all american, good health type models. Cindy’s look wasn’t distinctly different and as i remember she was marketed initially as baby Gia precisely because she had the look of the earlier models.
By comparison, Christy and Linda have a very distinct, memorable look. You wouldn’t call their look all american. In any way they are photographed.
I don’t know too much about modelling eras, but Cheryl Tiegs — what a bore. Even Kendall Jenner looks more striking than her.
Linda Evangelista was unique looking. Wonder why she’s not modelling now.
You’re forgetting Jean Shrimpton & Twiggy.
And Veruschka – she was amazing!
Cindy Crawford had a different career from Kate in that she was more of a commercial model and not high fashion. She wasn’t considered cool but more like Elle MacPhearson or a post Christy Brinkley. She wasn’t part of the Linda-Christy-Naomi and later Kate circle.
She was more of a brand and a business.
Cindy Crawford was an in-demand model because even though she was often labeled as an all-American beauty, her appearance was actually more versatile than a blonde hair, blue eyed Northern European look (the predominant look of the 70s). Meaning, IN PHOTOS she could look like she had some Italian blood or Spanish blood or Brazilian blood or Native American blood or Middle Eastern blood, etc. She had dark hair, dark eyes, wasn’t pale, and they could style her to resemble someone with a mixed ethnic heritage.
These aren’t my words. This is what has been said about her by the fashion industry. It’s an advantage for any model when you can give off an ambiguous ethnic quality. You can change your look for each assignment. She had the same long hair, but she knew how to give different expressions for the camera. I think she had more versatility than Kate. Kate often gives the same expression in photos.
Cindy and Christy, unlike Naomi and Linda, had a longstanding reputation for always being professional, which is why Cindy and Christy had the big cosmetics contracts and Naomi and Linda didn’t. You can’t behave like a diva if you want to work as a spokesperson for the big corporations. Cindy’s personality may be bland, but she delivered the sexy sporty image fashion wanted in the 90s.
Some of these comments are incorrect. She was successful in BOTH high fashion and commercial modelling. She first made her mark in fashion, regularly hired by top designers for haute couture and prêt-à-porter runway shows. She got her lucrative Revlon contract ,then she branched out into commercial work (like Pepsi) to expand her career.
Yeah, Cindy Crawford has always been a professional. I’m not surprised by her level of success. Christy Turlington always looked level-headed too.
I wondered what happened to Linda Evangelista, but if she wasn’t professional, that explains a lot.
She’s established enough (obviously) to get the work she wants without going through another channel first. Just makes sense moneywise. Models pay their agencies A TON.
Kate Moss hasn’t aged, IMO she looks even better now. And smart move not giving interviews – so your quotes of the past can’t be used against you. 🙂
Yup. Her job doesnt requiere eloquence and a charming personality anyway. Say nothing at all and people will have nothing against you.
lol she has actually aged a lot. You just need to see her unbrushed pictures. I saw a picture of her next to Naomi and damn, it’s true, blacks don’t crack.
Does not having any hair signify any kind of health problem that comes with age for women? Just curious, bc while Naomi does look ageless, she doesn’t have any hair. Or I guess she could have alopecia or something.
Yeah I saw her at the airport once and she looked her age for sure… I’d even venture to say she looked older than her age.
MP: Naomi’s hair situation is due to a constant use of weaves since her teens. It’s one of the unpleasant side-effects of weaves and hair extensions. The hair can be attached too tightly such that it pulls out the root of the hair. Used 24/7, all year round like Naomi, and the root weakens so extensively that it eventually can’t *regenerate hair anymore.
*as you see with waxing. Hair is pulled out at the root. Subsequent hair growth is weak and or finer than original. Frequent waxing eventually stops hair growth altogether. Too tight weaves/hair extensions have the same effect. In Naomi’s case, she’s left with a patch at the top of her head. The rest of her head is bald. Hair breaks or stops growing starting with the finer hair along the hairline. This affects everyone who uses weaves/hair extensions no matter their age.
I give Kate this – no matter how she’s aged, she doesn’t appear to have hit up the botox or fillers. That’s astounding restraint for someone her age and in an appearance-based line of work.
Maybe her wrinkles have been photoshopped out, but her cheekbones look great on this cover — they’re high but don’t look altered by whatever it is Madonna did to her face.
Non-magazine photos of her show she has aged really poorly in the face, IMO. You can tell she’s been a smoker. At the same time, I applaud her for not botoxing all of the character out of her face.
I too saw her in England a few years ago and boy did she look all kinds of rough. Very wrinkled and dried out. All those years of crazy partying (her friends call it “getting Mossed”) have def caught up to her.
This is a joke right? Hasn’t aged? Drugs, smoking, alcohol…. She looks way older than her actual age. Have you ever seen normal pics of her, just curious? I was shocked.
She has aged poorly from tanning, smoking, drinking, partying and poor nutrition. In person she looks rough. Now it’s simply her status that gets her work and her celebrity. She and Naomi were notorious for liking the harder aspects of partying.
@Magnoliarose: you’re exactly right. Fashion often plays it safe. They don’t want to take a chance on a newer, perhaps even more talented model, so they stick with what they believe is tried and true. Kate’s well-known and a recognized name still gets hired, even though, in her case, she needs lots of photoshop to erase that rough appearance. Gotta maintain fashion’s ludicrous illusion of perfection, ya know.
Has Kate ever slowed down her party lifestyle? It seems like she continues on with her old bad habits.
Take it from a huge model junkie. Kate Moss is the Michael Jackson of the modeling industry. She changed the industry.
How exactly? Genuinely curious as she always struck me as a continuation of the prefered industry look. Waify rather than lean or athletic like say Naomi.
She was the one to truly establish that body type in the industry. Before Kate, models were healthy looking women. She didnt just change the way models looked – she changed the way models model. Before Kate, models actually smiled.
No, she wasnt the first waif. But she is, undeniably, the most influential.
i think she has aged beautifuly. she has lived her life as she wanted it and it shows. she is not 20 anymore and that is how some older women look, not everybody ages without rinkles
Kate was the model who caused the preferred look for models to go from perfect glamazon to imperfect skinny waif.
And she’s outlasted god knows how many trends and ‘hot right now’ looks for models, which is VERY rare for any model. Healthy-looking Gisele-era early-2000s models, the ‘dollface’ alien-looking models of 2004-06, angular-looking Eastern European mid-2000s models, the Instagram model brigade with selfies and insane Cara D eyebrows, god knows how many progeny of rock stars…. they’ve come and gone, but Kate’s still here. (and so is Gisele, the only other one to last 15+ years at the top of the game).
Naya: Before Kate came along, the industry standard was super tall, incredibly beautiful women with a touch of the all american look to them. Glamour and excess. Unattainable beauty. Traffic stopping beauty. Perfect beauty. No point feeling inadequate due to their images in magazines because even if you saw the real thing unphotoshopped, their beauty was still staggering. And despite the current vogue, they weren’t super thin. The industry standard was a *US size 6-8. And all ethnicities as long as they were beautiful.
*google Elle MMPherson covers from the late 80s/early 90s against more recent covers. You can clearly see how much thinner she is these days.
Rachel Hunter would be considered plus size by today’s standards.
Then along came little Kate. Who looked like an ordinary girl. Beautiful, but ordinary. Not unattainably beautiful, not traffic stopping. Short by modelling standards. Skinny to extent that she had no curves at all. Bow legged. Snagly toothed. Unremarkable.
There was beauty in her ordinariness. And that was her appeal. And it was like a bolt of lightening in that garden of excessive beauty. The industry changed overnight to ordinary, pretty girls with attainable beauty. Kate became the prototype beauty that the industry still celebrates today.
Elle McMpherson and Rachel Hunter had/have great physiques but I don’t think their faces were extraordinary. Obviously I’d feel like a midget next to them, but I don’t think they have the kind of faces that would make me feel envy. (That isn’t to take away from the fact that they were good models or photographed well or encapsulated a certain kind of glamour, but face-wise I probably wouldn’t feel like I was missing out on something by not looking like them).
I think Kate Moss has the ability to look effortless in the clothes she wears, even if she might be kind of ordinary or accessible in terms of her height (I think her thinness was somewhat unattainable). I assume that’s part of what makes her a good model — she never looks like she’s trying hard even when wearing stuff Gwyneth might recommend or doing that weird open-mouthed lip thing that people do on covers.
Perplexed:to be fair, Elle and Rachel Hunter were SI models rather than fashion models. The standard for SI was/is about the body rather than the face. Ditto lingerie models, with exception of Stephanie Seymour.
She came out of nowhere and should have had everything against her(short, boyish etc) but she was compelling. In person she is like a blank canvas but in front of the camera she is truly transformed. She wasn’t trendy, she was a trendsetter and even now there are no new models to dethrone her.
Gisele has that too but in a different way. The runway is boring without her star power.
Her unapologetic rockstar lifestyle is a bit like Anita Pallenberg so the Rolling Stone connection makes sense.
Have any men ever graced the cover of Vogue? Maybe that’s why they didn’t put Mick Jagger on the cover.
If she’s 42, and getting the chance to be on the magazine, I think that’s a sign of at least accepting that a few models can get older and still get covers (although maybe this also means the younger generation of models could really be that boring and the editors are using icons to up sales.) So I would move to the side of “fine” rather than “enough already.” If she’s been on the cover that many times, I would attribute that to how old she currently is (she’s not 19) rather than being featured too much.
Off the top of my head:
Elton John. Shared cover with Elizabeth Hurley.
P.Diddy. shared cover with Naomi.
Johnny Borell. Shared cover with Natalia V.
Diddy covered with Naomi. And Kanye with Kim.
Oh yes, you’re right! I forgot about Kim and Kanye! How could I? Whoops. That was so recent too.
If you are throwing in American Vogue, then there is Posh and Becks.
Robbie Williams (shared cover with Gisele)
I guess they could have gotten Mick to pose with Kate. Has any man ever posed alone? (Besides Obama? I think I can vaguely remember him on the cover — I think some memories are coming back).
Call it the unimaginative brain that is the British Vogue editor.
She inherited an innovative magazine, and has turned it into a boring snoozefest of a marie claire magazine minus the community pages.
Abd she doesn’t step outside the lines she has drawn unless advertisers force her to.
She will always default to Moss because that is the only avant garde decision she has ever made – see those Corinne Day photo spread with an unknown Kate Moss from back in 1993.
Ps: i adore Kate Moss as much as it’s possible to adore someone you don’t know, but this cover is too much.
I have to give Shulman this – at least she uses models on her covers for most of the year, instead of going to US Vogue route with whatever dull actress of the month has a movie to promote. And the Vogue UK editorials aren’t as aggressively airbrushed and unimaginative as the US Vogue ones.
@teacakes.
Yes, I love that Vogue UK still uses models. Vogue Paris before Carine left though was the best for a while imo.
Alexander Shulman has let so many creative ideas and people slip through her fingers that at this point i believe she’s made a pact with the devil to keep her job.
It’s funny to see her hobnobbing with those same people after their ideas are in the mainstream being celebrated and you know that her invitation is purely because she’s a vogue editor and not because she was at the forefront or even middleground of the idea.
……but my personal emnity crystalised when she poo poo’d the Italian vogue edition (July 2008) that used all black models. Advertising and editorial alike. She responded to it with quotes about how black models don’t sell and how this edition was a publicity stunt that would fall flat. She also justified her *whiting out vogue.
Guess what? It sold out in hours and is a collectors item. It’s the best selling edition of all time.
*slowly in the 90s, she stopped using any non white models which was a wider fashion trend. She started using black models again because advertisers are using them. Specifically Burberry which underwrites many vogue events. They have been using Jourdan for years before Vogue started using her in their editorials.
@LAK – I hear you, she’s been complicit in a lot of buck-passing when it came to ridiculous standards in modelling – race, size, what have you.
I still remember when Jourdan’s first Burberry ad came out – that was a huge moment, especially since the brand pretty much positioned itself as traditional-but-cool young London, but only used white models before that. The Sacha+Jourdan ad was a nice way to bring the brand well and truly into current London.
I don’t mind Kate Moss, I think she’s a benchmark and a pioneer in many ways, but I am tired of seeing her mug on every Vogue cover (especially Vogue UK). She has at least one cover a year (at least it seems that way – I don’t know what the actual statistic is), and I’m bored of her. She gives great face and poses, no doubt, but she also always looks the same.
Enough already.
Yayyyyy Icon.
please, she’s a pro and it shows.
I’d rather have Kate on the cover 37 times than yet another of those vapid instagram nepotism models, she can at least take a good picture and after the Kendull and Gigi age I find it refreshing that she doesn’t court social media validation – she simply doesn’t need it, the pictures say enough.
I agree with everything you said teacakes. Kate looks different in every photo. She keeps her mouth shut and looks effortlessly glamorous on and off the catwalk. She will always be my favorite. Ot, but I’m so sad she’s getting divorced. The Kills are the best.
I know, I was really sad to learn about the divorce too – they’d been together for so long and she looked SO happy at the wedding. It’s sad it didn’t work out but they seem to be really low-key about it, which is a good thing I suppose.
The Kills are the actual coolest, I had a massive girl crush on Alison Mosshart ten years ago, and also on Jamie’s previous gf Valentine Fillol-Cordier. It’s like he has some kind of instinct that draws him to stylish women, because Vivi, Valentine and Kate all have killer style.
Ditto, Teacakes. Kate rules beautifully. She has and continues to manage her career so intelligently.
compared to the newer models, Kate definitely has a more interesting look and is infinitely more interesting. She needs to lay of the alcohol and cigs though. Of the newer batch of models coming up, Mica Arganaraz stands out IMO.
I never had an appreciation for Kate Moss when I was younger (maybe I just took it for granted that she was just doing what was required of her), but after seeing one of those make-up ads featuring Gigi Hadid, I now realize how well Kate’s cheekbones work in an ad.
Yes. I’m just uninterested in 95% of celebrity covers. Except Lupita. I can’t not buy hers!
So much yes in your posts. It is why I’ll be happy when the Nepogram models go away.
I’m not going to hate on a 40- something woman still getting prime jobs in the fashion industry considering how they usually chew up and spit out young girls and call them over the hill by 21 years of age. So more power to Miss Moss and all the other models still killing the game after their twenties.
^^this exactly. I hope Kate keeps working long into her cackling granny years, and doesn’t go near the botox and fillers – those cheekbones have had her aging very well.
Good point.
+1
Given that she’s 42, the number of covers she’s had makes sense in the context of her age. What we can deduce from the numbers is that she’s had a 25- something year career (which is great for a model).
Complaining about a 22 year old who has done 37 Vogue covers in the span of 3 years would make more sense, but I don’t think such a statistic exists.
she started working as a model at 14, so that’s an almost three-decade-long career now. Which is INSANE because most models are considered past their prime by age 25, but she just keeps going and going. She’s basically an institution at this point, especially in the UK.
I am guessing she gets covers because she still sales magazines. That is a feat that is few and far between now and days.
Kate Moss has always been the top model for me. She doesn’t have the perfect body and her teeth aren’t either but her photos are mesmerizing and beautiful.
37 times? Come on are there no others? Let’s see some fresh new faces please.
The new faces are getting covers, but they aren’t old enough to have done 37 covers yet. But the time Kendall or one of the Hadids are 42, they’ll probably have that many covers to their credit too.
Oh God do you think the Kardashian/Jenner family will still be a part of mainstream media in 20 years??? Hope not.
I hope not, but who knows? Why they’ve lasted longer than 2 months is beyond me, but they don’t seem to be going away. But maybe they’re the reason we’re getting a Kate cover instead, and her age probably works in her favour of being a known entity that isn’t, well, annoying.
I doubt any of these social media models will have any relevance past the age of 25, and I’m being very generous with that estimate.
And they certainly won’t last that long in high fashion, i predict they’ll move to the lad mag/swimsuit demographic that Kate Upton had a few years ago – good money, but being in a guys’ spank bank is pretty downmarket compared to doing high fashion, even if fashion pays less.
What teacakes said.
Yep, what I am about to say is cliche AF but Kate has that Je ne sais quois.
Love her!