Kate Moss, now 48, has been one of the big names in the modeling world for over thirty years. But those first years were very traumatic, she says in the interview. It all started for Moss when she was discovered at an airport at the age of 14. Then it went downhill. As a teenager she had to go to castings alone and traveled a lot of miles. At the age of 15, she had a “terrible experience” when she was asked to take off her bra for a photo shoot for a catalog. “I was very shy about my body at the time and I felt something was wrong. So I packed my things and ran.” That experience would have sharpened her senses, which she says has now become very good at spotting people who have wrong intentions.
However, the situation did not immediately improve. She befriended photographer Corinne Day, but it was a difficult friendship. Moss remembers crying a lot about nude shoots. “She (Day, ed.) would say: ‘If you don’t take your top off, I’m not going to book you for Elle.’ It is painful. I loved her. She was my best friend, but she was a difficult person. The pictures are great though, so she got what she wanted and I suffered for it, but in the end they really did me a world of good. They changed my career.”
Moss was therefore chosen as the model for the underwear campaign of the American designer Calvin Klein. She then posed with actor Mark Wahlberg, but that experience was also ‘not good’. Moss took Valium to get out of bed in the morning and again felt “objectified and vulnerable and scared.” She had to stand topless in front of the lens again. “They played with my vulnerability, Calvin loved that.”