Kate Moss, like a rolling star
At 38, she is still the tallest. Neither the escapades nor the competition got the better of his legend. Marc Lambron tells the story of the stainless icon, child of rock, adored model, muse and designer for the jeweler Fred. Kate Moss, or the face of an era. Kate Moss is 173 centimeters tall and weighs 53 kilos. Her measurements are 84-58-89, which looks like a phone number. If we tapped his line, the decryption would not lack interest. The young person was born on January 16, 1974 in Croydon, Surrey. Her father worked in a travel agency, her mother was a bartender. That winter, in the midst of the Watergate scandal, the Khmer Rouge bombed Phnom Penh, and Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the USSR. Ex-Beatle John Lennon had already decreed that the dream was over. The singer wanted to talk about the 60s, the glimpsed paradise, the failed revolution. It is always interesting to follow the destiny of children born under the sign of a dying dream.
Kate Moss: her life in pictures
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27 pictures
The chronicle reports that Kate Moss was spotted at the age of 14 by an agent, during a transit at JFK airport in New York, when she was returning with her family from vacation in the Bahamas: the Minotaurs always lie in wait for teenage girls at the entrance to the maze. Little Moss will soon be topless on the cover of The Face magazine. Calvin Klein notices her, she is launched. A grunge-era romanticism – we’ll call that Generation X – immediately finds its mirror in her: pale nymphet, casual twig. The first novels of Bret Easton Ellis, the discs of Nirvana accompany this rise. The whole reflects a spirit after the fall of the Wall, dark, sexual and high-tech. Baby Kate profiles the anti-Claudia Schiffer, the anti-Cindy Crawford. A typical Gen X scene, for example, could be an LCD screen in a Hong Kong apartment. Chinese people in dark suits watch anorexic girls parade there. The bulge of the gun holster can be seen under their jackets, while a CD of Rage Against The Machine spins endlessly on the player. At that time, Kate Moss could look like Gene Tierney in The Shanghai Gesture, the scene where the flamboyant actress pretends to be totally drunk or cameo. It symbolizes the dark and fashionable nihilism of the 90s.
Kate Moss, however, is not dark: just a newsboy knowing how to find, in front of the lens, the poses of the little girls that the Reverend Lewis Carroll loved to photograph half-naked. The photographer Mario Testino will confirm it: “Kate has taste, talent, humor, kindness, madness. What happened to Baby Kate? And where does she come from? Probably from a scene that played out before he was born. From a time when, like Stanley Kubrick's Lolita, cinema loved women-children. They could be called Carroll Baker, Jean Seberg or Tuesday Weld. Then came the heroic rock'n'roll of the 70s, Led Zeppelin and the Stones, and girls who had the face of Maria Schneider, Tina Aumont or Mimsy Farmer. So many severe burns, queens of the night sumptuously stranded on the Cinecittà sets. Kate Moss knows all of this. We even guess that his generation is totally haunted by the decade 1965-1975. Is Noel Gallagher a new John Lennon? Does Jude Law look like David Hemmings in Blow-Up? Is Stella McCartney the daughter of Paul McCartney? In the latter case, it seems that the answer is yes.
God save the little queenie...
And speaking of Kate Moss: is she the new Twiggy? The generation of the dying dream has therefore worked to recreate the legend. Kate Moss will have been a "party girl" from the Gucci era, seen on the arm of several photographers, a time close to rocker Evan Dando (of the group The Lemonheads). And above all, for several years, the companion of Johnny Depp, Mr. Cherokee himself, the reader of Edgar Poe and William Burroughs, the dark gothic, the darling of Tim Burton and Jim Jarmusch, the man in black and white. Together, these two had to play darts without hanging a target on the wall. Sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, we had to try to live up to it. At one time, Kate embodies the “waif look” (a silhouette of a skinny, abandoned little girl), earns 10,000 dollars a day, does detox stays at the Priory Clinic. And signs at least one memorable sentence: “I had enough of feeling like Dracula, I wanted to see the light of day, and not just at six in the morning. “We go along the abysses, but it becomes tiring. It's a vampire ball without Charles Manson, a biker spree without a final crash. President Clinton, however, will take her in his sights when he denounces the ravages of the anorexic look and the allure "Heroin is chic".
In the matter, Kate Moss, who we see a lot on MTV, has the sense of historical tributes. She will date the Morphine sisters of the RollingStones: Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg. She will appear in a Johnny Cash clip, then in an Elton John clip – honor to the survivors. Kate does all of this with a kind of quirky and fatal insolence. His name is almost an acronym. When Moss parades, it's not her who shows clothes, it's the clothes that show her. That she liked her job is not impossible. But we can also imagine that she ended up not knowing that she was being watched. Nevertheless, over time, the return of ballet flats, low-rise jeans, UGG boots, a certain rustic and very elegant use of denim, all of this owes a lot to Kate. There's an Oedipal generation thing about Kate. Not only because she was portrayed by Sigmund Freud's grandson, the great painter Lucian Freud. But because he floats in his vicinity a dynastic perfume of heirs to the electric guitar. His friends? LivTyler, daughter of Aerosmith singer; Sofia Coppola, daughter of Francis; Jesse Wood, son of Ron Wood, of the Rolling Stones. Kate arrived as the little match girl among the golden dolphins of King Rock's court, before becoming the queen of the hive. Sometimes she poses in tableaux vivants for television screens – we call them music videos –, we have seen her in silhouette invited to Primal Scream or the White Stripes. This is how one becomes the ninety-ninth female fortune of England. God save the little queenie...
Class, the Moss!
In France, the Kate Moss virus struck around the year 2000 a certain type of girl who added a cantonal and languid side to it. They annoyed me. I like Kate Moss, but much less her hexagonal clones. We could have called them the Mossettes or the Mosseuses. The kind “I rent an apartment with moldings but without any furniture, I dress in imitation couture-style second-hand clothing while listening to Tricky records”. The kind “I live with a depressive type that I protect, to whom I am essential, who needs my love”. The “I do herbariums, I eat low-fat yogurts, I am clairvoyant about my parents' faults” type. The kind “I am constantly doing internships, I harbor a stubborn resentment which has no real object, but which pushes me to sulk”. The "I'm complicated and moral, without makeup, I talk in a small plaintive voice on the phone, I ride a bike, my life is vague. »
A 90s Mosseuse, she was the kind of girl who could look at the moon on a summer night and say, “Classy, the moon! “I much prefer the real Kate Moss, as time itself does not change her. The windshield wiper wick, the mouth that imitates the Mae West sofa designed by Salvador Dalí, that air of a girl in a rut that is revived with floats, and the legs most often bare. Class, the Moss! One wonders if it is possible to approach it other than with monosyllables. You would want to push her against a wall so that she looks at you with dangerous eyes. On her, the diamonds look like butterflies. Archbishop, we would like this Christian to kiss your ring. Diamantaire, we would roll stones on his back, to see where they fall.
No doubt Kate Moss would be surprised to learn that it resembles a phrase by Stendhal, evoking a woman “naughty in the full sense of the term after three glasses of burnt rum”. I wonder how we could interview him. Would she listen to these French questions which invite reason and postulate that nothing is simple? Would she even consent to remember that she has a memory? In my opinion, she would respond rather like those little cousins who have known you since childhood and are bored.
What is Kate Moss for?
She must know that a life is made up of many accidents and few adventures. It is his wisdom. All the same, I would like to submit it to some musical experiments. For example, the black music bombardment of the 60s–Marvin Gaye, the Supremes or Martha Reeves & the Vandellas – to check that she is not just a pale duchess, to see if she can hear the supple, deadly growl of the tall velvet sophisticates. Or force her to marry a man in his sixties, say Neil Young. He would buckle her up in the back of his trailer, strum his guitar like a sachem who's pulled too hard on the pipe, he'd sing Cowgirl in the Sand to her with his angelic coyote falsetto. Neil Young is wearing turquoise encrusted fringed shirts, Kate must love that, it would all look very Santa Fe, terribly 1971, absolutely desert and rattlesnakes, totally Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell. A guy like Neil Young would do Kate Moss good.
But it was not exactly with Neil Young that she lived. For a while, we saw her with a certain Jefferson Hack, a journalist in magazines such as Dazed & Confused or i-D, who gave him a little Lila Grace in September 2002. At the time, Kate Moss wanted to make movies. To direct it, we would have seen directors such as Murnau or Pabst, assuming that they agree to come out of the sepulchre. In a silent film, there is no doubt that Kate Moss would be the best actress in the world: we do not really have a precise idea of the timbre of her voice. Only here, Pete Doherty announced himself, the singer of the Libertines, the syringed seducer, mister Nihilism in person. At the time, Kate was said to consume eighty Marlboros a day, so many nails driven into her future coffin. And she happily DJed at a nightclub, appropriately named Death Disco.
With Pete Doherty, Kate didn't just smoke tobacco. There is no need to recall the worldwide scandal, that cover of the Daily Mirror on September 15, 2005, the diabolical racket that ensued, the Moss filmed on the sly in the process of threading a line of coke in a recording studio, the contracts immediately broken, the flight to rehab of "Cocaine Kate", an apotheosis of the tabloids, a universal summit of sadistic compassion, a fatwa among fashionistas. Result? Kate Moss was earning $5 million a year before the affair, she raked in $8 the following year, making her the second highest-paid model in the world, behind Gisele Bündchen. A line in her nose sparked many others on checkbooks? Here is a morality for our time, which pays the rebels. As for the satanic Doherty, he gave way to Jamie Hince, of the group The Kills, whom she married in July 2011. Which proves that no one is irreplaceable. Kate, she survives everything. PippaMiddleton, next, it's grenadine syrup.
What is Kate Moss for? To sell fabric, of course. But also to dream with phrases. For example this one, found under a photo in an American magazine: “Kate Moss arriving at WatergateClub for the launch of her new perfume Velvet Hour. “Which means, you understood, that she arrives at the Watergate club for the launch of her new perfume, Heure de Velours. But in English, the set sounds quite Fitzgeraldian, with the word “Watergate” befitting the children conceived in 1973, and this Velvet Hour which is very VelvetUnderground. I hear this sentence, beyond the adulterated, as a death of innocence which nevertheless seeks innocence. Kate Moss is Kate Moss, but her image floats everywhere, like a state of mind. Everything she touches turns to gold. She is Queen Midas. Recent incarnation: she designs jewelry for the Fred brand. We could see her on the cover of Bryan Ferry's latest record, Olympia. These days, she also poses for the Pirelli calendar. Naked, as it should be. We would dream of meeting her live on a real beach. Kate, I've never seen her. She would perhaps have the effect of Mick Jagger, crossed one evening at the touch of a button at Castel. I had found him small; well... not very big. But this guy who squared off with the face of a bulldog watching the eyes on him – had we recognized him enough? – was the shadowy mouth of the Rolling Stones, the Rascar Capac of stadium madness, the Dorian Gray of hurricanes of crossfire. The whole affair is held in an attitude: Kate, like Jagger, is rock'n'roll. We don't get out. And that's the best we've had.
Express interview
Madame Figaro. – You signed a jewelry collection for the jeweler Fred. Where do you draw your inspiration from? Kate Moss. – In my tattoos: star, anchor, crescent moon. Some of the pieces I have created are already on the waiting list. And I can't believe it. You designed a collection for Topshop, you imagine bags for Longchamp, you work for Fred. Which of these experiences do you prefer? They all inspire me equally. People often ask me why I don't launch my own brand. I happen to be very happy to work with them. We have had a good relationship for years. Our current collaboration is therefore the result of a natural progression.
