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Kate knew she had the right look for a model before she left school.
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During a recent interview, Kate Moss said: “I wasn’t the prettiest girl in class - short legs, gangly teeth. I didn’t think I was model material, that’s for sure.” The woman who has been featured on countless magazine covers (30 times, at last count, on the cover of British Vogue) added offhandedly: “I think they’re all right, my looks, now. But I’ve never seen myself as pretty or a side of myself that people would like.”
Whether people did, the camera always has. Like those of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, another beauty of the photographic era, Kate Moss’s eyes are almost abnormally wide-set. Her high cheekbones not only set off a strong jaw but lend her face an ethnically indecipherable cast. Her ripe mouth, the upper lip fuller than the bottom, is what she terms her “most recognizable feature,” by which she means it is how strangers and the paparazzi always catch her out no matter how she disguises herself. “Even if I wore a hat and a wig,” Ms. Moss said, making a frame of her hands and placing it over her mouth. “You can always tell it’s me.”
Her teeth, even now, are irregular and pointed. And that in itself, say those in the business, tells you something worth knowing about Kate Moss.
“She’s not conventional at all,” said Fabien Baron, the editorial director of Interview. Mr. Baron, who did the art direction of the new book from Rizzoli, met Ms. Moss nearly two decades ago, when she was hired for a Calvin Klein campaign he oversaw. “She would come out of the Calvin meetings, saying, ‘Fabien, Fabien, do you think I should do my teeth?’ ” he said. “But she never fixed anything. She’s not perfect at all physically. You have to deal with the little teeth, the crooked legs. She has the mental power to put it forward.”
