Kate Moss, one of the world’s most famous models, has spoken of her anger at the conviction she received after photographs of her taking cocaine were published in 2005. She believes she took the blame for the widespread acceptability of drug use in it. circle
“I felt sick and quite angry,” the British supermodel revealed in a rare radio interview on Sunday, “because everyone I knew was doing drugs. So to focus on me and try to take my daughter away, I to think it was really hypocritical.”
Although Moss was not charged with the crime and kept her daughter, Lila, she lost lucrative contracts with several major brands and later formally said “sorry” in a public statement. “I had to really apologize if people were looking at me,” he told Lauren Laverne, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s long-running show Desert Island Discs.
For 30 years, Moss, 48, has represented the pinnacle of British cool. But the woman whose motto “never complain, never explain” was borrowed from her ex-boyfriend Johnny Depp used the interview to talk about the anxiety that crippled her teenage modeling years and of the abuse and mistreatment he suffered in the industry.
Moss with ex-boyfriend Pete Doherty at Glastonbury Festival in 2005. Picture: Matt Cardy/Getty Images
Moss also explained his decision to speak for Depp in his recent US defamation case against his ex-wife, Amber Heard, and talks about defending his old friend, British fashion designer John Galliano, who was found guilty of racist abuse in 2011.
“I believe in truth and I believe in fairness and justice,” he said. His appearance at Depp’s trial was motivated by a desire to set the record straight. “I know the truth about Johnny,” Moss said. “I know he never brought me down stairs. I had to tell that truth.”
The desire to stay by Galliano’s side arose from her belief that he is “not a bad person: he had a drinking problem and people turn away”.
“People aren’t themselves when they drink,” Moss suggested, “and they say things they would never say when they were sober.”
At 14, the owner of modeling agency Storm approached Moss on a plane ride, but she didn’t envision herself as a model. “I thought it was a no-brainer,” Moss said.
The start of his career in 1988 was traumatic and “hard work,” he recalled. She had to travel alone across cities to photograph castings. At 15, she had the “horrible experience” of being asked to take off her top for a bra catalog shoot. “Then I was very shy about my body, and I could feel that something was wrong, so I grabbed my things and ran away.”
She says the experience “sharpened her instincts”: “I can tell a mistake a mile away.”
With Johnny Depp in 1997. “I had to tell the truth about him,” Moss said, referring to his recent high-profile court case. Photograph: Crollalanza/Rex/Shutterstock
Her 16-year-old face was suddenly in international demand after a photo shoot for The Face magazine at Camber Sands in Sussex with her photographer friend, the late Corinne Day.
Moss admits she cries “a lot” about being naked. “She [Day] she’d say, “If you don’t take your top off, I won’t book you for Elle.” It’s painful. I loved her, she was my best friend, but she was a complicated person. But the photos are amazing, so she got what she wanted and I suffered for them, but in the end they did me a lot of good. They changed my career.”
As a result, American designer Calvin Klein chose Moss for a 1992 underwear campaign, but her memories of that job, posing with actor Mark Wahlberg in New York, are “not good”. He took Valium for his anxiety about getting out of bed for work.
Topless again, Moss felt “objectified and vulnerable and scared,” she told Laverne, adding, “They played on my vulnerability. Calvin loved it.
Her friend Day was responsible for the controversial images taken for Vogue magazine a year later, which were censored for promoting the “chic heroine”. In the photo in her own apartment, the always thin Moss was shown in her underwear. “I was a scapegoat for a lot of people’s problems,” Moss said. “I was never anorexic. I’ve never been. I’d never taken heroin. I was thin because I didn’t eat on set or at shows and I’d always been thin.”
On the cover of iD magazine in 1996. Photo: iD Magzine/Vice
A quote often attributed to Moss, that “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” was not his own coin, he said. It came from a note taped to the fridge door in an apartment, designed to dissuade a dieting friend from snacking.
Born in 1974 to a travel agent father, Peter, and a “glamorous” mother, Linda, who worked part-time in a bar, Moss said she suspects she was quite lonely. Her appearance was not observed at home, and her mother was surprised when modeling work came to her daughter.
Her “brutal” teenage behavior worsened, Moss recalls, once her parents split up: “I started smoking spliff and hanging out with older boys,” she says, confessing that she was filled with sadness. “Yeah, I was heartbroken…everything was a little dark.”
Moss started her own modeling agency in 2016, and signed up her own daughter early on. “I told him, ‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. If you don’t want to do this shoot, if you don’t feel comfortable, if you don’t want to model, don’t do it.” I take care of my models. I make sure they’re with agents on set, so when they’re taken advantage of, someone’s there to say, “I don’t think that’s appropriate.”
Moss has moved his main home to his Cotswolds country house and reveals he has become obsessed with gardening. Partying, she says, is “boring for me now,” adding, “I don’t get out of control anymore.”