Kate at 50: Why she is finding ageing harder than her own ‘Mossy Posse’

When Kate Moss wakes up on Tuesday 16 January, she will open her eyes to the first day of her sixth decade. As most women will attest, turning 50 is a significant milestone that can be somewhat daunting. But while many women in the public eye insist that reaching midlife and menopause is to be celebrated, it is unlikely that Kate will see it this way.

As the most iconic model of a generation, if not many generations, Kate’s looks have been scrutinised and minutely observed for 36 years. Recruited as a model in 1988 when 14, since the age of 16, she has been lauded as the summit of British cool, a validation that relies upon the insouciance of youth – something that is easy to attain at 25 but becomes increasingly difficult to sustain at 50, whatever the age-positive movement says.

To understand the significance of Kate’s big day it helps to understand how and why the world has maintained such an enduring love affair with Croydon’s finest export. As the “It-girl” of the Nineties, Kate changed the face of fashion and pop culture. Her “Third Summer of Love” shoot for The Face magazine in 1990 transformed the future of fashion shoots. Instead of the tanned, toned, Amazonian supermodels who were the norm, photos of Kate revelled in the beauty of her imperfections; pale, skinny, vulnerable and spirited.

“She was the complete antithesis to the models of the time. Short and tiny with slightly bandy legs and crooked teeth. But she was exquisite. The most beautiful girl I had ever seen,” says Edward Enninful, editor-in-chief of British Vogue and a long-time friend of Kate’s. “She heralded a new kind of beauty. A realism that changed the fashion industry.”

Following that Face shoot, Kate was feted by fashionable stylists and underground British magazines championing the new “grunge” vibe – but building a career from modelling wasn’t easy. A friend who lived with Kate and her then boyfriend, the model/photographer Mario Sorrenti, in a shared house in west London remembers it as a difficult time.

“Kate couldn’t get any designers interested in working with her. She was only picking up occasional unpaid editorial work and was completely broke. She would have to borrow money to get the train home to see her mum in Croydon.”

The seismic turn in her career that would change her life forever came from American designer Calvin Klein. The friend recalls how Kate was in NYC for an unpaid editorial shoot when she auditioned for Klein, who was casting a new advertising campaign. “Calvin signed her to a contract and she flew home on Concorde with $3m in her pocket. We couldn’t believe it. It was a transformation that happened in the space of just one week. Astonishing.”

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The Calvin Klein campaign, featuring Kate alongside the crotch-grabbing hip-hop star Marky Mark (now known as actor Mark Wahlberg), was Klein’s bid to recreate the controversy over his 1980s campaigns with the 15-year-old model Brooke Shields. Fabien Baron, the French art director who’d designed Madonna’s Sex book, had joined Calvin Klein as creative director and remembers how Klein had originally wanted French singer Vanessa Paradis for the campaign: “But Vanessa turned Calvin down” he says. “The photographer Patrick Demarchelier and I had both worked with Kate on an editorial shoot for Harper’s Bazaar and thought she was incredible. You put her in front of the camera and she just explodes. Calvin took one look at her and declared he had completely fallen in love. And that was it. From that moment Kate was Calvin’s girl.”

Her next campaign for Klein in 1993 came about when Baron had a meeting with Sorrenti. He showed Baron a scrapbook of hundreds of photographs and Polaroids he’d taken of Kate. “Mario was obsessed with Kate,” says Baron. “We decided to send Kate and Mario on holiday for a week to the West Indies, just the two of them, to shoot the fragrance campaign for Obsession. It was a dramatic decision. There was no make-up artist, no stylist, just two young people in love. The photos were incredible, so intimate and raw.”

The Obsession campaign made Kate the most bankable model in the world but with fame came the beginning of a backlash and she became the pin-up girl for everything that was wrong with the industry. It began with a lingerie shoot in 1993 for British Vogue called “Under-exposure” which saw an unhappy-looking Kate photographed in a selection of nylon underwear and baggy-crotched American Tan tights. The “elegantly wasted” images provoked hysterical headlines about paedophilia and the glamorisation of anorexia and hard drug use. The term “heroin chic” was coined and Kate was given the moniker “The Waif”.

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“I was a scapegoat for a lot of people’s problems” she has said since. “I was never anorexic. I never have been. I have never taken heroin. I’ve always been thin. How many times can you say, ‘I’m not anorexic’?”

Then came the Calvin Klein campaign that featured Kate alongside a group of teenagers in sensual poses which prompted accusations of paedophilia. The US president Bill Clinton spoke out, Klein withdrew the ads and the US Justice Department launched an inquiry into whether child pornography laws had been broken. The DoJ decided not to prosecute Calvin Klein for alleged violations as minors hadn’t been used as models but a photographer friend, who has known Kate since she was a teenager, recalls the impact the furore had on her.

“We all felt bad for Kate, that she had become the central character in that whole narrative. Unfortunately, once those stories take hold, it’s hard to stop that train.”

Suddenly, the world was as interested in what Kate did outside of modelling; who she was dating (Jonny Depp), what party she was attending, what she was wearing. A gifted stylist in her own right, what Kate did for a brand was phenomenal. A leading designer who regularly hired Kate says: “She has this very special power that makes everything she wears very desirable. She only had to wear a piece of clothing, a bag or a pair of sunglasses and everybody wanted it, whether it was high-end or high street.”

The public gleefully followed every development in Kate’s life; the relationship ups and downs, her part in the Cool Britannia “Primrose Hill set” (the celebrity cabal of Noel Gallagher, Meg Matthews, Sienna Miller, Sadie Frost and Jude Law, who were a tabloid gift with their bed-hopping and break-ups). But it was Kate’s relationship with the Libertines and Babyshambles singer Pete Doherty that almost destroyed her standing when, in 2005, she was branded “Cocaine Kate” after photos showed her doing cocaine at a music studio. She lost multimillion-pound contracts with Burberry, Chanel and H&M, but apologised and came back stronger.

For years, Kate was hailed as the coolest girl on the planet but at some point, every “girl” becomes a “woman” and the antics of a groovy youth inevitably start to look a bit sad in midlife. In a rare interview with The Times in September, she admitted to being in denial about her big birthday: “I’m not turning 50. No. I’m not thinking about it. I do not feel 50.”

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Friends say that they think Kate has been struggling to cope with ageing and could be, for the first time in her life, feeling a little lost. Her long-time female friends, the “Mossy Posse”, have all successfully reinvented themselves in a groove that feels authentic. Actor Frost has moved into directing documentaries and is a regular exponent of yoga and meditation. Matthews has embraced midlife as a menopause campaigner, with a book titled The New Hot and her name on a range of organic “intimate beauty products”. Naomi Campbell has transcended modelling to become a cultural icon, with a forthcoming V&A exhibition dedicated to her. And model Rosemary Ferguson, married to YBA bad boy Jake Chapman, has retrained as a nutritionist and is much in demand as a certified functional medicine practitioner.

Kate too has been experimenting with a bit of new-age shapeshifting by reinventing herself as a wellness guru: her new beauty and wellness brand Cosmoss sells a variety of beauty products with spiritual names like “Golden Nectar” and “Sacred Mist”. But while she insists that she left London for the Cotswolds to “open a door” to “balance, restoration and love”, and says she believes in the power of crystals and “moon bathing”, many fans are struggling to reconcile this new Kate with her old wild boozy ways which once earnt her the nickname “The Tank”. As one of her social media followers put it: “I want the old Kate Moss back. The one who doesn’t give a shit and dresses cool.”

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And her new “clean” identity risks setting her up for even more intense scrutiny. Just three months after the much-lauded launch of Cosmoss, a speech she gave at the Wall Street Journal Innovator Awards left fans commenting that she appeared to be slurring her words. Shortly afterwards, Kate stood down from the public gaze for a few months and returned fresh-faced and reinvigorated, refocusing her energies on her modelling agency where she has established herself as a kind of matriarch of the modelling world.

She has certainly brought new meaning to the term “nepo baby” by signing the offspring of all her famous mates, many of whom are her godchildren. Among those on her agency roster are Ella Richards (Anita Pallenberg and Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards), Bliss Chapman and Elfie Reigate (Rosemary Ferguson and Jake Chapman), Stevie Sims (uber photographer David Sims and designer Luella Bartley), Lux Gillespie (Primal Scream frontman Bobby Gillespie and stylist Katy England) and Stella Jones (Mick Jones of The Clash). “Kate is the best boss ever,” said Reigate on being the first female model signed to the agency. “It’s like a family”.

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The most successful model on the Kate Moss Agency books is undoubtedly her daughter Lila, who has fronted campaigns for the designers who made her mother’s name. It cannot be easy for Kate. Midlife is often particularly poignant for women with daughters as they are forced to watch them blossom while their own bloom fades.

Of course, the fact her male peers seem to get away with the transition into middle age with little scrutiny is surely not lost on her either. Depp and Doherty have lost their chiselled heart-throb looks, with pot bellies and receding hairlines, but women are expected to “grow” into a new skin – where wrinkles, weight gain and saggy jawlines are strictly off-limits. It is a tricky position to be in for most of us but when you are hailed as one of the most beautiful women in the world, it must be excruciating to be judged when your entire raison d’etre in the world’s eyes is based upon how you look.

All of which adds up to why Kate needs to forge a third act that feels authentic to who she really is. When you have been hailed as the coolest girl on the planet, there is a risk of being “stuck in time”. Of course, most women would give anything, literally anything, to look like Kate Moss does today but that may bring little comfort as she blows out 50 birthday candles.

She, like all of us, would do well to heed the advice of model-actor Shields who, 40 years after the Calvin Klein campaigns that focused on her youth, has managed to live out her midlife with grace, saying: “Putting yourself in the position where you’re not chasing youth is the best way to stay young.”