Kate smokes a cigarette while waiting for her turn at a Caribbean photo shoot last year
It was, Kate later reflected, 'like boarding school', and she loved it. Tellingly, part of what she 'loved' was meeting 'normal' people.
'I did that whole walking in with dark glasses thing,' she said, 'but after five minutes it felt ludicrous.'
Kate intended to stay for two weeks but ended up staying for five (the Priory recommends a stay of 28 days for the treatment of addictions).
Not once, she claimed, did she crave a drink, though she couldn't remember a time in the past decade when she had walked down a catwalk sober or woken without a hangover.
She could not in all honesty 'blame' the state into which she had fallen on modelling.
She would probably have 'got there in the end whatever', she reflected. 'Modelling just speeded things along.'
When she emerged from The Priory in December 1998, her home in North London had been purged of alcohol.
She had also had the house exorcised, once by a Christian priest and once by a Thai lady who pinpointed a tribal mask as an 'anchor for evil'. Kate had it burned.
For several months she attended Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings and saw a psychiatrist once a week.
For a time she enjoyed a relatively stable and conventional relationship with magazine editor Jefferson Hack, with whom she had a child, Lila Grace.
But unfortunately for Kate, her stint in The Priory was not her last brush with rehab.
In the first week of 2005, her friend Mick Jones, a former member of The Clash, invited Kate to watch Pete Doherty working in the studio with his band, Babyshambles.
Doherty was lightly witty but certainly didn't appear overwhelmed by the presence of a supermodel in the studio.
That degree of nonchalance appealed to Kate. She invited him to play at her 31st birthday party at her house in the country and by the end of that evening it was obvious they were a couple.
Draw up a list of habits and character traits that no mother would want to find in her daughter's boyfriend and Doherty would tick every box.
He was five years younger than Kate. By the time she met him, he had fathered an 18-month-old son, Astile - born to Lisa Moorish, former flatmate of Meg Mathews and mother to a child by Liam Gallagher.
He had spent four weeks of a six-month sentence in prison for burglary. He was addicted to heroin, with three failed attempts at rehabilitation to his name. His drug use made his behaviour unpredictable and his moods violently changeable.
He had little to recommend him as a partner. Kate fell for him instantly.
Troubled: Kate with Pete Doherty
It was not long before their relationship settled into the pattern it was to follow for close to three years.
Doherty would appear splashed across the newspapers in some drug-related tale of impropriety and hot on its heels would come word that Kate was 'having second thoughts' and 'issuing ultimatums'.
Yet for all the speculation there was never any physical evidence of Kate's supposed uncertainty. She had fallen for Doherty, and for a long, long time he could do no wrong - no matter how much wrong he did.
He confidently asserted that he would be going into rehab, that he and Kate would marry and that he was happy.
'Who wouldn't be? I want to make it work,' he said. 'The drugs have got to stop or I'll lose her.'
No doubt he meant it each of the many times he said it. In that, he was no different from any other addict.
Doherty and Kate seemed convinced that they had somehow discovered the true versions of themselves that nobody else could ever see, never mind understand.
As proof of that devotion they each had a tattoo on their bottom: a 'K' in a love heart on his, a 'P' on hers. Kate seemed to indulge him.
But friends saw a junkie who let Kate down, who would leave her waiting for him to turn up at her home or at the pub.
They saw a man with filthy fingernails, an East End flat in disarray and a musical talent that seemed to be stalling before it began. They saw a string of court appearances and failed attempts at rehab.
They saw Kate, her hair unwashed, her face free of make-up because Doherty liked to see 'the true' Kate.
In the early months, Kate's association with Doherty did her career no harm. Quite the opposite.
Kate had moved towards brand endorsements, and each time her face was in the paper, regardless of the reason, it kept her in the public consciousness. It maintained her cool factor, too. At first.
On September 6, 2005, Kate went to Metropolis Studios in Chiswick, London, where Babyshambles were working on material for their album.
It was late, the atmosphere was relaxed and members of the band milled around. Kate chatted with Mick Jones and teased Pete. The session went on into the early hours.
A few days later, Kate and Doherty flew to New York. It was the beginning of the city's fashion week and she had a shoot lined up.
Early in the morning of September 15, Sarah Doukas, the founder of Storm, called Kate in her hotel room. Somebody had secretly filmed Kate's visit to Metropolis Studios.
There was Kate, perched on the edge of a leather sofa, casual in a sleeveless T-shirt, knee-high boots and a tiny denim mini-skirt, her hair dishevelled and tucked behind one ear so she could focus on the business in hand.
Balanced to her right was a CD cover, on which she meticulously chopped and crushed up a block of white powder.
She used a credit card, carefully sharing the powder into equal, generous lines, then she took a rolled-up banknote and snorted one.
The pictures were grainy, but they were impossible to explain away. Within a couple of weeks of the story breaking, Kate was back in rehab.
'This scrawny kid didn't have a clue'
Kate pictured at 14 in one the photographs from her first session for Storm
In October 1988, Sarah Doukas, founder of Storm model agency, sent a 14-year-old Kate to photographer David Ross in Earl's Court, London, for her first professional shots.
'I opened the door to see this scrawny little child,' Ross recalls. 'I thought it was some girl who had pressed the wrong buzzer and her mum was obviously in the building and she was trying to find her.
'I was expecting her to say, "Can you tell me where flat so and so is?" Instead she said, "I'm Kate."'
Ross realised this was one of Sarah's girls. He told her he couldn't take any pictures that day because she was so young, and that she should come back the next day and bring her mother or a friend.
She turned up the following day with a friend. She also brought with her a couple of changes of outfit: a white jumper with a leaf motif, black tapered trousers, neat pumps and a scrunchie to tie back her unkempt hair.
'She was trying, God bless her, but she didn't have a clue,' Ross recalls.
The resultant shots were neither remarkable nor promising.
Kate, pictured right in one of the photographs from that first session, wasn't particularly tall. Her features were not voluptuous. She had crooked teeth and her lips were rosebud-like but pursed.
Her complexion was youthful but not flawless and her bone structure pretty enough but, however much it has been admired over the years, it seemed to Ross no more remarkable than that of countless other far prettier girls who had stepped into his studio.
Her eyes were interesting - arresting even - but not truly astonishing.
For Kate, the whole afternoon, according to Ross, seemed 'a bit of a lark'. He feared that it was a waste of film.
Escaping into fantasy
Johnny Depp gave Kate an appreciation of writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote and Hunter S. Thompson.
Kate has read and re-read the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. She makes no secret of the extent to which she relates to the American author's tales of desperate, destructive decadence, and just as she has been drawn to the books again and again, so she has returned to the lifestyle many times over.
Fitzgerald was the inspiration for the theme of her 30th birthday party: The Beautiful And Damned.
When Kate was in The Priory, Marianne Faithfull sent her C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles Of Narnia. Kate had read the stories as a child, but she read them again, gratefully escaping into their fantasy world.
'I just loved them ... it would completely be the whole heavy day and then go back and get into bed and read these books. It was such a treat.'
Other post-Priory favourites were The Picture Of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, works by Henry Miller and erotica by Anais Nin.
'I don't think you have to not like sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll just because you stop,' she has said.
'I'm changing, but I don't feel like I'm turning into a person who doesn't like that kind of lifestyle.'
She is also a fan of mystical bestseller The Celestine Prophecy, by James Redfield, which convinced her that her meeting with Johnny Depp was predestined.
Bizarrely, Lila, her daughter, is named after the eponymous heroine of Lila Says, a book first published in France telling the sexually explicit story of a 16-year-old girl growing up on a sink estate.
The mystery of Kate's girlfriends
Tactile: Kate with Jade Jagger in 2000
In March 1999, Kate was in New York for Anna Friel's opening night in Patrick Marber's play Closer.
At the after-show party Anna looked stunning, dressed in a silver gown with a see-through bodice. Anna was thrilled that her friend was there.
They embraced and were so tactile that one photographer covering the party claimed his film was confiscated because the pictures were so 'hot'.
It was not the first time Kate's physically affectionate relationship with her female friends had been commented on. She and Anna had already famously shared a playful kiss in The Groucho Club in London - the pair clearly enjoyed winding up the Press.
The celebrity pages of newspapers and magazines featured images of Kate holding hands with, draped around or on the knee of female friends - including Jade Jagger, pictured above with Kate in 2000, Meg Mathews, Sadie Frost and Samantha Morton - far more regularly than they carried images of Kate and any man.
Her New York agent, Paul Rowland, commented: 'Kate is just very affectionate.'
But there were other factors at play, too. Female friends are often more tactile than their male counterparts, but Kate's demeanour was more flirtatious than many.
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.
Kate is, by nature, flirtatious and tactile, and drink and drugs are great inhibition removers.
dailymail
I don't think rehab would be relevant as things are now..
(just big gossip here)
