Kate Moss: Everyone’s favourite party girl

In a world where models and actresses are the new wellness gurus, thank god

SO model Kate Moss was “disruptive” on an EasyJet flight. Cabin crew wouldn’t serve her a drink, so she retrieved her own vodka from her hand luggage. She was coming back to Luton, after a holiday in Turkey to celebrate her friend Sadie Frost’s 50th birthday. A fellow passenger reportedly said that Moss was charming and that EasyJet staff reacted disproportionately. Nothing else happened. Moss chatted with other passengers and played ‘hairdresser’ with a little girl. No arrests were made.

What makes this story extraordinary are the words ‘EasyJet’ and ‘Luton’ in the same sentence as ‘supermodel’. Moss is one of the most famous models in the world. At 41, she has been in the business since she was 14, and is worth a fortune. Yet she necks vodka from her hand luggage on an economy airline. For this, we can only love her.

READ MORE: Moss had airplane meltdown over lack of sandwiches

Somewhere on the spectrum between Gwyneth Paltrow and Amy Winehouse hovers the lively, irrepressible Moss. Were she more like Winehouse, she’d be dead by now — to remain as successful, and to look as good as she does, for as long as she has, could not accommodate any major addiction issues. Addiction worsens with age. Moss gets better.

Nor does she blog about kale, which is why we like her so much. Little is known about her health regime — unlike many of her contemporaries, she has never published a (decaffeinated) coffee table book urging us to emulate her lifestyle (all juice cleanses and colonics), or urging us to buy lifestyle products she has endorsed (and which involve words like ‘organic’ or ‘holistic’.) She may well like kale as much as Gwyneth does, but we will never know. And we value her for not telling us.

As everyone else makes digital noise all day long, Moss eschews social media, having once told The Times: “I couldn’t think of anything worse than people knowing what I’m doing all the time. I just don’t understand it. I don’t get it all. Why would anybody want to know?”

She is not on Twitter, and her Instagram account is so secret she only has a handful of followers, presumably close friends. She never gives interviews, and has never engaged with reality TV, nor shown celebrity magazines around her gracious home. These are the usual publicity vehicles. She is entirely private.

Which makes Moss’s penchant for rock stars and vodka all the more fun. She canes it like a 25-year old — unapologetic, enthusiastic, without caring how she is perceived. In this age of almost fetishistically clean living, her dirty lifestyle remains refreshing; not for her pipettes of distilled Evian or macrobiotic smoothies. She remains, at heart, a south London party girl.

Yet unlike her fellow south Londoner, Naomi Campbell, Moss never let her success turn her into anything unpleasant. While Campbell became synonymous with diva, Moss kept it real — and really shrewd. She knows when to walk away when anything edgy threatens to tip her too close to the edge of her commercial viability.

She walked away from the late photographer, Corinne Day, who helped launch her career as a 14-year-old, in 1988, when Day became too embroiled with the heroin chic aesthetic; she walked away from boyfriend, Pete Doherty, when it became clear he was not going to leave heroin for her. She walked away from cocaine, in 2005, checking herself into rehab to ‘rehabilitate’ her career, from Cocaine Kate to Comeback Kate, and never looked back.

At the start of her career, she was called “just another common bitch” by a photographer in Paris. Aged 15, she “laughed in his face”, according to Maureen Callahan, in her book Champagne Supernovas. John Galliano put her in his 1990 show, calling her “my rough little diamond.” She left Croydon and a mother who was, writes Callahan, “distant and far from encouraging.”

At 18, she was heading the Calvin Klein campaign, despite her co-model, Mark Wahlberg, dismissing her looks, saying “she looked like my nephew.” By 1994, she was dating Johnny Depp, then a prodigious drug user who broke her heart, ending the relationship and calling her a “crazy bitch.” She was known as The Tank, for the amount of vodka — the alcohol least likely to ruin her looks, a doctor told her — she could put away. She never complained, never explained.

For her 40th birthday, she donned bunny ears and hopped onto the cover of Playboy. Since 2011, she has been happily married to rocker, Jamie Hince, hangs out with Primal Scream, and reminds us of a modern version of Anita Pallenberg — with whom she is apparently good friends — except without Pallenberg’s formerly crippling heroin addiction. She is the face of cheap London brand, Rimmel, rather than La Prairie or Crème de la Mer, and has never even pretended to give up smoking. She sounds like an awful lot more fun than the coconut water and kale gang. Or, as an old Alexander McQueen t-shirt once read: “We Love You Kate.” She remains something of an international treasure, disruptive or not.

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