Kate Moss

It must have been about 1994 when, all over New York, photographs like the one on the right started appearing on bus shelters and billboards all over New York City. I, an oversexed man who knew fashion models as if they were baseball players, was struck with the thunderbolt not unlike the one that Michael Corleone was hit with in Sicily when he first saw Apollonia in The Godfather. Who was this girl, who looked unlike any model before her?

She was Kate Moss, of course, and quickly almost everyone would know her name. She was a teen from the working class suburb of Croydon in England, and she was a new breed of model: the waif. Volumes would end up getting written about her and her kind--was she a gamine, "heroin chic," an advertisement for anorexia, or just a new way of thinking, that women didn't have to be close to six-feet-tall to be models. I don't have any answers to any of those questions, I just know that she lit up my imagination like a solar flare.

I worked at Penthouse magazine back then, one of the few places in the entire country where they can't say much about the open display of sexual images in the workplace. Therefore my office wall was, shall we say, provocatively adorned. One section of it was covered with a collection of Kate Moss images, mostly the stark black and white Calvin Klein ads shot by Patrick Demarchelier (the ones without Marky Mark). The very first thing I ever did on the Internet was to go to a Kate Moss gallery site. I even went to meet her at a signing (I think it was at Macy's) in the absurd, hopeless belief that she would take one look at the schlump that stood before her and cast aside the rich, exotic millionaires she cavorted with on a regular basis and throw in her lot with me. Alas, it did not happen.

Kate Moss turns 35 today, and has certainly had her ups and downs since emerging into stardom some fifteen years ago. She has had some high-profile relationships with men like Johnny Depp (who seems to share my taste in women, as he was also involved with my other abiding crush, Winona Ryder) and Pete Doherty. She had a baby. She was photographed snorting cocaine, but now has become a sort of grand dame of fashion, with her own clothing line. And she still looks stunning (and frequently goes topless in public--her champagne-glass-shaped breasts may be the most photographed of all time, Pamela Anderson excepted).

Fashion models aren't as important now as they were back in the go-go nineties. Around the turn of the century it became more desirable to have entertainers on the covers of magazine. It seems as if models, just for being models, aren't as interesting to the general public anymore. They have to date famous men, or have a sex tape, to break through as household names. Even the models in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue seem anonymous these days, and they have resorted to using female athletes and Beyonce to drive interest.

But when models could scale the heights of fame just for their physical allure, well, Kate Moss broke the mold. For the life of me I can't think of another of the waifs that accompanied her during that phase, but she's still there, and I tip my hat to her.