Why Did She Do It? Kate Moss: Part 2

Last post I talked about model Kate Moss, discovered at the tender age of 14 and still successful today, but not without a pitted road along the way. In 2012, Moss spoke with Vanity Fair regarding a photo shoot with Mark Walhberg for Calvin Klein in 1992, when she was about 18 years old. It is now iconic for the era, but unfortunately it popularized what is considered the “heroin chic” look, the rail thin girl with dark circles under her eyes who consumes more heroin than anything else. Here are some of the advertisements:

This is what Moss said regarding the campaign:

“I had a nervous breakdown when I was…18, when I had to go and work with Marky Mark [Walhberg] and Herb Ritts”…“It didn’t feel like me at all. I felt really bad about straddling this buff guy. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t get out of bed for two weeks. I thought I was going to die. I went to the doctor, and he said, ‘I’ll give you some Valium,’ and Francesca Sorrenti, thank God, said, ‘You’re not taking that.’ It was just anxiety. Nobody takes care of you mentally. There’s a massive pressure to do what you have to do. I was really little, and I was going to work with Steven Meisel. It was just really weird—a stretch limo coming to pick you up from work. I didn’t like it. But it was work, and I had to do it.”

Regarding another photo shoot with Corinne Day that she did topless when she was only 16, Moss says this: “I see a 16-year-old now, and to ask her to take her clothes off would feel really weird. But they were like, If you don’t do it, then we’re not going to book you again. So I’d lock myself in the toilet and cry and then come out and do it. I never felt very comfortable about it.”

So why did she do it? A common theme in many of her interviews is that she does not know who she is and is easily led by others. She came to embody the “heroin chic” as more than just an image. Broken relationships, excessive drinking (earning her the nickname “The Tank”), and stints in rehab have rocked her life. She has even compared her life to that of one of her favorite authors, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In a 2008 article for DailyMail, titled “Hooked on hedonism…inside the dark and disturbing world of Kate Moss – by the people who really knew her,” Laura Collins writes: “Years of stripping off for photoshoots had altered her sense of her body; she was disconcertingly matter-of-fact about nakedness and had an almost defiant sense of her own beauty.” She, and we, have become desensitized, losing that sanctity and wonder of the human body. As humans with dignity we do have the right to choose what we do with our bodies. But with that freedom comes the responsibility of also being aware of how our choices affect others. Moss did not have to take her top off. It was her choice to do that, but from her interviews above you can see how the choices of others left her feeling that she had no choice. She did not take the Valium and ended up addicted to worse things.

Recent news for Moss suggests that she has split from her husband, Jamie Hince, whom she married in 2011. She stated in her Vanity Fair interview that she was not fed well in her beginning years as a model, with no food backstage or the places where she was put up, with little time in between to get anything herself. In the above mentioned DailyMail article Moss said regarding her troubled life that “[s]he would probably have ‘got there in the end whatever’…’Modelling just speeded things along.’ Everyone has the potential of going astray and I do not wish to throw blame around, but I desire those involved in any profession that requires the human body, and specifically here the fashion and artistic professions, to make an effort to keep a person’s dignity and privacy intact. Take care of one another! Generally speaking, models have accepted that they have to do whatever it takes, whether it be posing nude with someone they don’t know or having trysts off-screen, and that they are completely dispensable. If you won’t do it, there are 100 more just like you. That is the message, and that in and of itself is dehumanizing. I lament that a young Moss was required to do things no one really has the right to demand, and that now she is willing to display her body in whatever manner is asked of her. The human body is beautifully and wonderfully made. We are made to share life with one another, but it is so much more fulfilling when it is not spread so thin.

The Vanity Fair interview was the December 2012 cover story. The DailyMail article was published October, 2008. Other information was gathered from Wikipedia, ABC7, and Us Weekly.