How many news Kate generates! Every time I was about to write this reflexion, more updates offered me a new argument. During these last days she bought a London cab and drove her friends around, presented her new line for Top Shop, went running around Amsterdam spreading the word of her engagement, was kicked out of the Pére-Lachaise cemetery in Paris for dancing on top of Jim Morrison’s grave and, finally, I saw her arriving angry to an airport and charging at journalists with the luggage trolley (her daughter acting as a boat’s bow) —all this, in five days.
What a gold mine of content-less information. But let’s not lose perspective. Despite or because all this, Kate Moss is the millennium change icon paradigm. Actresses were those who reigned during the 20th century, those to imitate, to dictate aesthetic and behaviour rules, to be the centre of scandals that we now tenderly recall watching from the perspective of time. Just like Marlene Dietrich or Katherine Hepburn imposed trousers for women. Mannequins, for the concept of supermodel was scarcely applied to a couple of the preferred superstars of photographers like Avedon and who barely had coverage outside the catwalk or publications such as Vogue, adapted to fashions imposed by films and other sacred giants of fashion, like Coco Chanel, another untameable, or Dior’s
New Look and Balenciaga’s stitches.
The seventies put an end to all established system, industrial, cinematographic, musical, sexual. Models started to be known by their names and iconic looks. Twiggy was not the prettiest, there was Shrimpton for that, but she created the obligation of looking at these girls like more than clothes hangers forever. Actresses surrendered to the requirements of new looks. In
Rosemary’s Baby Polanski portrayed Mia Farrow’s metamorphosis from demure into sort of an awkward Twiggy with a haircut that went down in history. What happened next is known history. Models have turned into actresses, singers, entrepreneurs, exemplary mothers, girlfriends of rockers, TV hosts, footballers wives. Sometimes they adapt to convention and sometimes they’re impossible to restrict. Like Kate.
Moss has an irreproachable 20-year career where she has always given what a model should offer: attitude and an expressive face and body capable of mutating like a chameleon without losing her own essence. What she does with her personal life is her business. It seems absurd to me either stigmatizing or idolizing her rebel attitude which, strengthened or not, sells well. When she appeared on the tabloids caught in the act of satisfying her addictions, our inherited old-fashioned rationality made us think her career was done. But we are in the 21st century and the ways of reason are those characteristic of our time —full of turns. Far from shutting down, disappear, serve as scapegoat and lower her head, she came through reinforced. I still remember a subsequent Vogue issue were I counted over a dozen publicity campaigns with her image on them. Even though it sounds like the outcome of a story with no moral, it does have something for anyone to learn. You can’t play the victim in life; it does not only make you look awful but it permits to glimpse a low moral sight. It is nobody’s fault but yours. Kate’s grandeur lays in how what happened and what is to occur was like water off a duck’s back for her, explaining only the strictly necessary to know, with no exaggerations or sorrow. The UN is worried because they consider that by covering the exploits of
Kates,
Britneys or
Amys, the press sets a wrong example for the girls wanting to follow their steps. Let’s please leave examples and role models for home, for the family. They have not asked to be followed. Let’s teach our children not to be mere copycats, to choose for themselves. The fact that genetically blessed and effortless thin models exist does not mathematically equal anorexic girls (if it were so, who do obese girls imitate, anyone?). Lowering our heads and blaming “society” for our addictions, disorders and failures is the right way to unhappiness and personal dissatisfaction. We have to be very conscious of the difficult balance of things, of the little dictatorships we are submitted to. Like we are to beauty’s dictatorship. The fact that covers are filled with a handful of extraordinarily beautiful women we would not care to look like doesn’t imply us being unhappy for not having their looks. It is a matter of common sense. That common sense lacked by a lot of little girls and, what is worse, by their families, when they go to a million castings and beauty contests without anyone daring to tell them that they are ugly. Or, being politically correct, that they don’t fit into the current beauty canon. Who can I blame for not being intellectually capable of finishing a degree in a record time? Getting some parts of our body fixed to see ourselves better is different, just as we study for personal satisfaction, not to be awarded the Nobel Prize you don’t deserve. It works the same way with role models. Celebrities’ habits are their business. The only thing I ask for is for them to be that, stars, which seems too much to ask sometimes.
Popularity has to be reached, paid for and survived. Kate Moss is, not only a survivor, but also winner who can laugh at herself and at the industry that at once praises and doubts her. Long live Kate, dancing on top of old idols’ graves or not.
Text by Alaska for Vogue España
Translation by Iñaki, soVIPzone
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