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James Brown, now living in New York, was not only styling Kate’s hair, he was also trawling the vintage shops looking for clothes for her.
Later, too, some of her favourite vintage dealers would also keep their eyes open for clothes she would love – at one stage Steven Phillips of Rellick was sending over a bag of clothes a week for her to peruse.
As her fame grew and her confidence expanded on the red carpet, so her look became more pared down.
In 1997, she appeared at the Cannes Film Festival in a simple pale grey Cerruti shift dress among a sea of glitz. The grey dress was a seminal example of what would become one of Kate’s most distinctive style quirks, 'going the other way,' by subtly rebelling against the expected dress code.
According to Lori Goldstein, who styled the Cerruti advertising campaign shoot on which Kate discovered the dress, the dress also betrayed unshakeable confidence. 'That’s Kate’s style; she doesn’t need to wear anything more than that,' says Goldstein. The outfit catapulted Kate onto Best Dressed lists worldwide.
The end of her relationship with Depp marked the beginning of a new era for Kate. Back in London, she found herself in the midst of the ‘Cool Britannia’ years, friends with a mixture of rock royalty like the Rolling Stones, Anita Pallenberg, Marianne Faithfull, the McCartney family and the Gallaghers, plus new designers like Matthew Williamson.
There was much clothes-swapping with her new girlfriends –and Anita Pallenberg in particular proved a great friend and mentor, on one occasion passing on her original Biba playsuit, knowing how much Kate would appreciate it.
Kate’s understanding of the importance of fit played a key role in the confident appearance of her many looks. Her trademark tight-to-the-torso silhouette was a simple but effective way she managed always to look as if clothes were made for her.
Off the catwalk, Kate invariably wore monochrome clothes. But, like Anita Pallenberg, the friend she named as a fashion icon, she did love experimenting with prints.
Cool Britannia: Kate with Jade Jagger, and right, last year with Stella McCartney
These were eventful years – bringing spells in rehab, a flirtation with a gamine hair crop, a stable relationship with Dazed and Confused magazine’s co-founder Jefferson Hack, the birth of a baby daughter, Lila Grace in September 2002, and a well-publicised romance with Babyshambles singer Pete Doherty.
But her life was increasingly under public scrutiny – and her wardrobe ever more widely copied.
Years later, Kate would claim that there had never been a moment when she realised women were trying to dress like her. But the earliest example of Kate’s personal style causing a fashion storm was the moment in January 2000 when she wore a vintage pair of battered, buckled, slouchy Vivienne Westwood boots from the designer’s 1981 Pirate collection to a Santana concert in London.
'If people had told me a girl could create a stir like this over a pair of bloody boots, I would never have believed them,' says Steven Phillips of Rellick who had found the boots for Kate.
Festival chic: Kate's style became widely emulated
Cheap Date magazine editor Kira Joliffe remembers bumping into Kate at a party and talking about the boots: 'I had two pairs and (I told her) the cobbler who made them was closing. Kate knew about the guy who made them (because) Bella Freud was really into them because she had worked at Vivienne Westwood.
'You could tell she was taking in what was being said about these shoes. It wasn’t because someone had given her these boots and said they were cool; she was engaged with the history and the background.'
The boots fitted perfectly with Kate’s new look; that of a nonchalant, London girl with a pseudo-skint scruffiness and fitted perfectly with her gig-going, chain-smoking and unapologetically louche return to the party circuit.
As Pop editor Katie Grand observed: 'I don’t really think Kate is that bothered about what people think of her.'
Suddenly, Rellick was receiving 200 calls a month about the pirate boots and they were selling for a fortune on e-Bay. High street stores started making their own versions and within the year Westwood herself put the original boots back into production. It was the beginning of the emergence of Kate as a global style icon.
Post-baby, Kate emerged at the height of her powers as a style icon, wearing roman sandals, 1950s prom dresses, ballet pumps – and single-handedly kicking off the skinny jeans fad. She turned successive Glastonbury festivals into a walking fashion show of shorts, hunter wellies and kaftan dresses paired with black fringed lace-up hippy boots.
In an age when celebrity stylists were becoming commonplace, Kate’s passion for shopping was starting to seem idiosyncratic. 'She’s risen above that whole thing of other people doing things for her. I don’t think anyone else (celebrity) does that' says Charlie Brear, stylist for Kate’s Rimmel advertising. 'She’s in there, sourcing from source, like a stylist.'
It was no surprise, then, that the outfit Kate chose for her 30th birthday in 2004, with the theme The Beautiful and the Damned, after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s1922 morality tale about the destructiveness of beauty and moneyed decadence, was a complete one-off.
She appeared in a floor-length midnight-blue sequinned gown, an original from the period, which she wore with her hair in loose curls, and her eyes smoky with dark eyeshadow like a singer from a jazz club.
The dress had previously been owned by Britt Ekland, who bought it from a vintage shop for the premiere of The Man with the Golden Gun, in 1973.
The beautiful and the damned: Kate Moss at her 30th birthday party in a vintage 30's dress
'I doubt she could have found anything like that anywhere else… they don’t make dresses that spectacular any more,' said Britt. Yet, barely a month after the party, Gucci presented a midnight-blue sequinned floor-length dress on its catwalk. Pure Kate.
Soon, Kate herself would see the merits of sharing in her own powerful influence on consumers by designing her own collection for Topshop. 'I think they (Topshop) kind of copy me sometimes, so I said, “I could give you my stamp and you could get it direct.”'
Aware of her uncanny knack of predicting the next big thing, she used it to design a phenomenally successful collection, which was effectively a snapshot of her life so far.
'I see things other people don’t sometimes,' she explained. 'It’s very random but I have this… radar. I’ll think, “Mmm I fancy wearing a legging” and then, all of a sudden, on the runways it’s all leggings. And it’s not like we’ve talked. It’s like a collective consciousness. It’s weird.'
And still, despite two decades in fashion and becoming a mother, Kate shows no signs of wanting to slow down. Just a year after populising the Nico heavy fringe, prompting a wave of imitations worldwide, Kate has just unveiled yet another radical look, a tousled bob.
'She’s sexy but she’s never really changed into a proper woman,' says designer Liza Bruce. 'She doesn’t ever seem to be tired or want to go home.'
'Years and years from now, when you look back on pictures of Kate, you’ll get an idea of what our time was about,' says stylist Brana Wolf. 'You’ll understand where fashion was at that time, because they all want to wear what Kate Moss wears.'
Extracted from Kate Moss: Style by Angela Buttolph, to be published by Century on 2 October at £20. Copyright (c) 2008, Angela Buttolph.
Later, too, some of her favourite vintage dealers would also keep their eyes open for clothes she would love – at one stage Steven Phillips of Rellick was sending over a bag of clothes a week for her to peruse.
As her fame grew and her confidence expanded on the red carpet, so her look became more pared down.
In 1997, she appeared at the Cannes Film Festival in a simple pale grey Cerruti shift dress among a sea of glitz. The grey dress was a seminal example of what would become one of Kate’s most distinctive style quirks, 'going the other way,' by subtly rebelling against the expected dress code.
According to Lori Goldstein, who styled the Cerruti advertising campaign shoot on which Kate discovered the dress, the dress also betrayed unshakeable confidence. 'That’s Kate’s style; she doesn’t need to wear anything more than that,' says Goldstein. The outfit catapulted Kate onto Best Dressed lists worldwide.
The end of her relationship with Depp marked the beginning of a new era for Kate. Back in London, she found herself in the midst of the ‘Cool Britannia’ years, friends with a mixture of rock royalty like the Rolling Stones, Anita Pallenberg, Marianne Faithfull, the McCartney family and the Gallaghers, plus new designers like Matthew Williamson.
There was much clothes-swapping with her new girlfriends –and Anita Pallenberg in particular proved a great friend and mentor, on one occasion passing on her original Biba playsuit, knowing how much Kate would appreciate it.
Kate’s understanding of the importance of fit played a key role in the confident appearance of her many looks. Her trademark tight-to-the-torso silhouette was a simple but effective way she managed always to look as if clothes were made for her.
Off the catwalk, Kate invariably wore monochrome clothes. But, like Anita Pallenberg, the friend she named as a fashion icon, she did love experimenting with prints.
Cool Britannia: Kate with Jade Jagger, and right, last year with Stella McCartney
These were eventful years – bringing spells in rehab, a flirtation with a gamine hair crop, a stable relationship with Dazed and Confused magazine’s co-founder Jefferson Hack, the birth of a baby daughter, Lila Grace in September 2002, and a well-publicised romance with Babyshambles singer Pete Doherty.
But her life was increasingly under public scrutiny – and her wardrobe ever more widely copied.
Years later, Kate would claim that there had never been a moment when she realised women were trying to dress like her. But the earliest example of Kate’s personal style causing a fashion storm was the moment in January 2000 when she wore a vintage pair of battered, buckled, slouchy Vivienne Westwood boots from the designer’s 1981 Pirate collection to a Santana concert in London.
'If people had told me a girl could create a stir like this over a pair of bloody boots, I would never have believed them,' says Steven Phillips of Rellick who had found the boots for Kate.
Cheap Date magazine editor Kira Joliffe remembers bumping into Kate at a party and talking about the boots: 'I had two pairs and (I told her) the cobbler who made them was closing. Kate knew about the guy who made them (because) Bella Freud was really into them because she had worked at Vivienne Westwood.
'You could tell she was taking in what was being said about these shoes. It wasn’t because someone had given her these boots and said they were cool; she was engaged with the history and the background.'
The boots fitted perfectly with Kate’s new look; that of a nonchalant, London girl with a pseudo-skint scruffiness and fitted perfectly with her gig-going, chain-smoking and unapologetically louche return to the party circuit.
As Pop editor Katie Grand observed: 'I don’t really think Kate is that bothered about what people think of her.'
Suddenly, Rellick was receiving 200 calls a month about the pirate boots and they were selling for a fortune on e-Bay. High street stores started making their own versions and within the year Westwood herself put the original boots back into production. It was the beginning of the emergence of Kate as a global style icon.
Post-baby, Kate emerged at the height of her powers as a style icon, wearing roman sandals, 1950s prom dresses, ballet pumps – and single-handedly kicking off the skinny jeans fad. She turned successive Glastonbury festivals into a walking fashion show of shorts, hunter wellies and kaftan dresses paired with black fringed lace-up hippy boots.
In an age when celebrity stylists were becoming commonplace, Kate’s passion for shopping was starting to seem idiosyncratic. 'She’s risen above that whole thing of other people doing things for her. I don’t think anyone else (celebrity) does that' says Charlie Brear, stylist for Kate’s Rimmel advertising. 'She’s in there, sourcing from source, like a stylist.'
It was no surprise, then, that the outfit Kate chose for her 30th birthday in 2004, with the theme The Beautiful and the Damned, after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s1922 morality tale about the destructiveness of beauty and moneyed decadence, was a complete one-off.
She appeared in a floor-length midnight-blue sequinned gown, an original from the period, which she wore with her hair in loose curls, and her eyes smoky with dark eyeshadow like a singer from a jazz club.
The dress had previously been owned by Britt Ekland, who bought it from a vintage shop for the premiere of The Man with the Golden Gun, in 1973.
'I doubt she could have found anything like that anywhere else… they don’t make dresses that spectacular any more,' said Britt. Yet, barely a month after the party, Gucci presented a midnight-blue sequinned floor-length dress on its catwalk. Pure Kate.
Soon, Kate herself would see the merits of sharing in her own powerful influence on consumers by designing her own collection for Topshop. 'I think they (Topshop) kind of copy me sometimes, so I said, “I could give you my stamp and you could get it direct.”'
Aware of her uncanny knack of predicting the next big thing, she used it to design a phenomenally successful collection, which was effectively a snapshot of her life so far.
'I see things other people don’t sometimes,' she explained. 'It’s very random but I have this… radar. I’ll think, “Mmm I fancy wearing a legging” and then, all of a sudden, on the runways it’s all leggings. And it’s not like we’ve talked. It’s like a collective consciousness. It’s weird.'
And still, despite two decades in fashion and becoming a mother, Kate shows no signs of wanting to slow down. Just a year after populising the Nico heavy fringe, prompting a wave of imitations worldwide, Kate has just unveiled yet another radical look, a tousled bob.
'She’s sexy but she’s never really changed into a proper woman,' says designer Liza Bruce. 'She doesn’t ever seem to be tired or want to go home.'
'Years and years from now, when you look back on pictures of Kate, you’ll get an idea of what our time was about,' says stylist Brana Wolf. 'You’ll understand where fashion was at that time, because they all want to wear what Kate Moss wears.'
Extracted from Kate Moss: Style by Angela Buttolph, to be published by Century on 2 October at £20. Copyright (c) 2008, Angela Buttolph.
] but I do wonder how its possible to write at length about one persons style.
it's from style.com
