Commentary on Kate Moss
From the Sunday Herald:
‘Do we ever see Kate Moss freezing her butt off on the sidelines of a drizzly park while trying to coax little Lila Grace off the see-saw?’
Fiona Gibson
“Famous for being rich. Not a scrap of talent. Mercilessly pedalled by the fashion industry as some kind of icon. Pfff,” my friend Paul snorts in response to my flashing a magazine photo of Kate Moss under his nose while wittering on about Her Royal Gorgeousness. The mag in question is new weekly Grazia in which the writer gushes that Kate “works too many looks to dedicate herself exclusively to Boho. Of course, when she chooses to, she pulls it off with classic Moss panache.” It’s worth pointing out that the journalist is female. Glowing reports of Kate’s style, Kate’s hair, Kate’s date-’em-ditch-’em approach to boyfriends tend to be penned by women. Mention Kate to a man and his response hovers somewhere between indifference and downright hostility.
“Snotty looking princess,” one male colleague mutters, “who’s not even interesting enough to be beautiful.”
“She wears fur,” rants another friend. “What’s she thinking, poncing about in rabbit fur boots and a stole? She doesn’t have to. It’s her choice, and she should know better.”
“I thought she was vaguely interesting during her Corinne Day waif phase,” chips in Mark when I interrupt his high-powered day to ask whether he fancies Kate. “What’s cutting edge about her now? I mean, does she actually speak?” I point out that Kate ‘famously’ doesn’t give interviews, to which Mark retorts, “So we have an icon for a generation that doesn’t actually say anything. That shows how vacuous we’ve become.”
Well, excuse me. The whole point of models, surely, is to be looked at and admired, not to actually say anything. Things go horribly wrong when models start talking. Who can forget Linda Evangelista crowing, “I don’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day”? She has also wittered, “It was God who made me so beautiful. If I weren’t then I’d be a teacher,” and, “I can do anything you want me to so long as I don’t have to speak.” We’d rather they didn’t, actually, as your more humdrum model talk rarely strays from, “I eat chips three times a day”, “modelling is soooo boring” and “I was the gawky kid in high school and everyone hated me”.
Kate’s different. She says virtually nothing, apart from retorting, “I wear what I want to wear,” when questioned about that stole. “I can’t help liking her,” a (female) friend enthuses. “How could I not warm to a knock-kneed skinny-malinky from south London who’s just an inch taller than me?”
I like it that she doesn’t harp on about performing 8000 stomach crunches before breakfast, or brag that she consumes just one meal a day, and that her main goal health-wise is to “cut down on my smoking”. Plus, she makes no bones about the fact that doesn’t do anything much.
The Queen once asked her, “What do you have to do to be a model?”
“You just have to dress up really,” Ms Moss replied. Sure, there’s the minor matters of throwing parties, smoking loads of ****, hanging out with Stella McCartney, finding space in your closet for billions of free designer clothes and having your portrait painted by Lucien Freud – but how hard can that be?
Personally, I can’t help feeling that one of Kate’s major achievements is to ensure that having a child has not impacted on her swishy lifestyle one jot. Is Kate ever papped in Asda, hauling a purple-faced toddler away from the Kinder Egg display? Do we see her freezing her butt off on the sidelines of a drizzly park while trying to coax little Lila Grace off the see-saw? Is her “effortlessly Boho” look ever marred with sick, wee or Ribena spillages? Never mind acting as ‘muse’ to artists such as Tracy Emin and Sam Taylor-Wood, Kate’s talents would, I feel, be better served at parent and toddler groups in the form of inspiring talks about, “How to raise a child while displaying no outward signs that you’re actually a parent.” I mean, does the woman actually know how to collapse Lila’s buggy?
Another eerie Kate fact: all that, ahem, ‘partying’ has, rather unfairly, failed to give her skin the texture of a crumpled Tesco carrier bag. So what stops your average male from wishing to throw himself at her feet? Her teeny-weeny bosoms? Her funny little pixie face? Or the fact that she knocks around with achingly hip bands which, rather oddly, has my male friends seething in a – dare I say it – almost jealous kind of way?
Calvin Klein once declared that Kate “defines her generation”. My friend George, a plumber and closet Kate fan, puts it this way: “She has the kind of face that draws you in. She seems real, she’s up for a good time, and you get the feeling she wouldn’t look down on you.” George laughs, adding, “If Kate needs her pipes fixing, I’m her man.” At last: a non-international-fashion-designer-male who ‘gets’ Kate.
“Yeah,” he adds, “but then, I fancy anybody.”
Fiona Gibson’s novel Wonderboy is published by Flame, £10.99 20 March 2005