“I don’t want to be myself, ever. I’m terrible at a snapshot. Terrible. I blink all the time. I’ve got facial Tourette’s. Unless I’m working and in that zone, I’m not very good at pictures, really,” Kate Moss tells Vanity Fair contributor James Fox in the December-issue cover story. Even on her wedding day to rock musician Jamie Hince, in 2011, Moss looked to her old friend John Galliano to tell her who to be. As Moss recalls, “On my wedding day, I’m like freaking out, obviously. ‘You’ve got to give me a character.’ And [Galliano] said, ‘You have a secret—you are the last of the English roses. Hide under that veil. When he lifts it, he’s going to see your wanton past!’”
Moss tells Fox she regretted doing the 1992 Calvin Klein photo shoot that helped skyrocket her to fame. “I had a nervous breakdown when I was 17 or 18, when I had to go and work with Marky Mark and Herb Ritts,” she says. “It didn’t feel like me at all. I felt really bad about straddling this buff guy. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t get out of bed for two weeks. I thought I was going to die. I went to the doctor, and he said, ‘I’ll give you some Valium,’ and Francesca Sorrenti, thank God, said, ‘You’re not taking that.’ It was just anxiety. Nobody takes care of you mentally. There’s a massive pressure to do what you have to do. I was really little, and I was going to work with Steven Meisel. It was just really weird—a stretch limo coming to pick you up from work. I didn’t like it. But it was work, and I had to do it.”
Moss also talks about how uncomfortable she was posing nude when she was young. Remembering her now classic photo shoot with Corinne Day for The Face, Moss says, “I see a 16-year-old now, and to ask her to take her clothes off would feel really weird. 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. I never felt very comfortable about it. There’s a lot of boobs. I hated my boobs! Because I was flat-chested. And I had a big mole on one. That picture of me running down the beach—I’ll never forget doing that, because I made the hairdresser, who was the only man on the shoot, turn his back.”
Despite immediately becoming a poster girl for “heroin chic” after those early photo shoots, “I had never even taken heroin—it was nothing to do with me at all,” Moss says. “I think Corinne—she wasn’t on heroin but always loved that Lou Reed song, that whole glamorizing the squat, white-and-black and sparse and thin, and girls with dark eyes. She loved that look. I was thin, but that’s because I was doing shows, working really hard. At that time, I was staying at a B and B in Milan, and you’d get home from work and there was no food. You’d get to work in the morning, there was no food. Nobody took you out for lunch when I started. Carla Bruni took me out for lunch once. She was really nice. Otherwise, you don’t get fed. But I was never anorexic. They knew it wasn’t true—otherwise I wouldn’t be able to work.”
During a brief but intense romance with Johnny Depp, Moss says she finally felt taken care of. “There’s nobody that’s ever really been able to take care of me. Johnny did for a bit. I believed what he said,” Moss says. “Like if I said, ‘What do I do?,’ he’d tell me. And that’s what I missed when I left. I really lost that gauge of somebody I could trust. Nightmare. Years and years of crying. Oh, the tears!”
In response to the paparazzi culture that hangs on to her every “look,” Moss—inducted in 2006 into the International Best-Dressed List Hall of Fame—says that’s “why I just wear black jeans now. Or gray. If you do a different look every day, they’re going to be waiting for the next look, and then it’s a paparazzi shot. Whereas if you just wear the same thing, then they get bored and leave you alone.” It’s a far cry from the old days. Moss describes a phenomenon known to her friends as “getting Mossed”: “People that don’t know me get Mossed. It means, I was gonna go home, but then I just got led astray. In the best possible way, of course. I mean, it’s always fun, and a good time.” Her friend Jess Hallett counters, “It can be a nightmare if you’re the only one there. ‘Please can we go home?’ ‘No.’” On one such night in South Africa, “I remember phoning downstairs,” says Hallett, “and saying, ‘Can we have an alarm call for seven ᴀ.ᴍ., please?’ They said, ‘That’s in five minutes, madam.’ And we had to wait for this jet, in this hangar in South Africa, in this awful heat. We hadn’t been to sleep. We were literally lying with our faces on the concrete, trying to keep cool.”
Oh, how times have changed. “I don’t really go to clubs anymore. I’m actually quite settled,” Moss tells Fox. “Living in Highgate with my dog and my husband and my daughter! I’m not a hell-raiser. But don’t burst the bubble. Behind closed doors, for sure I’m a hell-raiser.”