HOW A NUDE KATE MOSS
HELPED DEFINE THE 90S
Kate Moss has given a rare, in-depth interview to Vanity Fair, in
which she looks back on almost 25 years as a model. Her revelations that she
felt exploited, panicked and out of her depth as a teenager plunged into the
world of high fashion – together with the fact that pastoral care was basically
nil – are sad and not surprising. You can only hope that today’s models are
better looked-after. The fact that there is a union for models is a
good start, and long overdue.
Moss singles out the shoot that launched her 25-year career of fantastic
success as one on which she felt particularly uncomfortable. “I see a
16-year-old now, and to ask her to take her clothes off would feel really
weird,” she says. “But they were like: if you don’t do it, then we’re not going
to book you again. So I’d lock myself in the toilet and cry and then come out
and do it.”
Clearly, even with the sole man on the shoot turning his back as Moss
divested herself of her bikini (the pictures were taken by a woman, Corrine
Day), blackmailing someone, especially someone so young, into taking their
clothes off would not be something one could defend – which no doubt makes what
I am about to say sound even worse. But here goes: this wasn’t any old topless
shoot, but one which changed the course of fashion history.
When Moss appeared on the cover of the Face in 1990 with an
image taken from this session (the rest ran inside), it marked nothing less
than the transition from the 80s to the 90s. As I wrote last year when the
pictures were exhibited in London, the sight of flat-chested,
wonky-toothed Moss wearing a feathery headdress seemed to encapsulate the
euphoria of those long-distant times. In 1990, the Berlin wall had just come
down, rave culture was going full pelt and the feeling that old certainties were
being toppled by a new generation. Moss put a face to that generation.
At a stroke, the pictures redefined the prevailing ideals of beauty.
Moss says that she felt self-conscious about the mole on her breast, but the
fact that she showed it did us all a favour. Suddenly power-dressing, pointy
bras and wearing two inches of slap were out, while wonky teeth, greasy hair
and generally looking normal were in. Moss was recognisably a young woman with
a personality – and from Croydon, south London, at that. She wasn’t some
passive fantasy glamourpuss. The reason many women feel an affinity with her –
the fact that she is unpolished, unapologetic and up for a laugh – starts right
here in these early pictures.
Moss had no way of knowing – especially at such a young age – that the
pictures she was making would turn out to be revolutionary, but it would be a
shame if she was unable to feel some good about the impact they caused. Her
quotes in Vanity Fair suggest not, but the fact the she had a long friendship
as well as working relationship with Corinne Day (who died in 2010), implies
that her feelings could be more ambivalent.
No one should be coerced into doing something they don’t want to, but
without nude models, art history as we know it wouldn’t exist. Certainly Moss’s
topless shot tells us as much about the mores of 1990, as the woman lounging
naked at a picnic in Manet's Le Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe does about the changing sexual attitudes of the early 1860s.
For many models, taking your clothes off is part of the job. When I
worked for the Face (much later – I started in 1999), our fashion director Katie
Grand was at pains to emphasise that a fashion shoot was a collaboration
between model, photographer, stylist and all the other people who worked on it,
and that the models – particularly if they had to take their clothes off, a
freguent occurrence in her pictures – should feel an active, looked-after part
of the creative process rather than its passive subject. Hopefully that is the
way fashion shoots work now. The fact that Moss has posed for umpteen nudes
since, with many different photographers, suggests that it was the coercion
rather than the nudity that upset her.
Ultimately, the shoot was a bad experience for Moss, but a turning point
for fashion and art. Back in 1990, she took one for the team.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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