Fred Vermorel - Kate Moss

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For Tolsty

In the realm of fashion, where breathless enthusiasm sings harmony with toxic ennui.

Jay Mcinerney, Model Behaviour, 2000

Thus every Part was full of Vice,
Yet the whole Mass a Paradice

Bernard Mandeville, The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turnd Honest, 1705

She used to have one pair of shoes with spikes at the back that she called her sex boots

because she said she wore them when she had sex.

Vanity Fair, quoting a journalist who interviewed Kate Moss, December 2005

Welcome to The Circus.

The Circus is a barn attached to Kate Moss country house. The place is cavernous, with high ceilings and wooden rafters daubed with black paint. The ancient brickwork is scarred and pitted,

The Circus is lavishly decorated with red, white and black drapes: huge rolls of fabric looping from rafters and festooning the walls, suggesting some kind of occult fte, and giving the sense of an ominous chapel.

This feeling of worship is enhanced by the numinous half light streaming through narrow slits cut high up on the walls and through cracks in the old barn doors. Light also filters through the incongruous crescent or lunette, windows, whose panes resemble the rays of a rising or maybe setting, sun. Again, a feature you might find in a chapel.

Adding to this effect is an enormous and striking portrait of His Satanic Majesty, Keith Richards.

The doyen of sex and drugs and rock and roll here shows a wizened and frazzled profile, pouting a cigarette. The pose is nonchalantly decadent, eyes narrowed and heavy lidded, hair fluffed up, collar turned up, a flare of light accidentally strobing the image and enhancing its insolence: the mood defiant cool.

This image dominates the room, lending the Richards aura to all proceedings. Its position beneath the chapel-like window adds to its icon-like implication: opposite the stage, inciting devilry and sanctioning debauchery the Edge.

And high above is a large mirrored ball hung from the rafters: hundreds of tiny mirrors that reflect and seem to soak up the spectral light and which has witnessed some rum goings on, especially on the evening of 16th January, 2004, when Kate Moss and Pete Doherty fell in love

Beauty is potent, but money is omnipotent.

English proverb

F orget Croydon. That is a fantasy she likes to spread as much as the media does. A supermodel from Croydon: beauty flowering out of the concrete towered, motorway infested, chav ridden wastelands. Someone on an American web site helpfully explains that Croydon equates to Newark.

But if you know your way around, and leave the everlasting Brighton Road with its boarded up properties and dingy corner shops, and head into some of those side roads towards Shirley Selsdon Forestdale you get a very different picture.

Because it all gets leafier and leafier, until you are near arcadia, or its suburban equivalent, a place as the prophet of suburbia, CG Masterman announced, fit for suburbans, whom he defined as a happier race than city dwellers: superior in manners and sportsmanship, better fed and educated and even better looking (the prettiness gap is as marked between UK city centres and suburbs as when you go to from London to Paris), a homogonous civilisation, detached, self centred and unostentatious, a state of semi-detachment and eventually you get to the leafiest bit of all, you get to Sanderstead which is where Kate Moss really comes from spiritually as well as spatially.

Croydon may be the general area, and convenient shorthand, but Sanderstead suburbia, is whats inside her. It accounts both for her timidity and nihilism and for her state of semi-detachment the restlessness that makes her ideal for fashion and search for dream-men to endorse her ethereal fashion self.

Otherwise, her merry-go-round of lovers and partying is to pass the time of day time hurts because it perplexes which is why we so often find her killing time, and especially on beaches and most often in Ibiza, that cod-exotic suburban get-away-from-it-all fantasy of her E generation.

Q: What does your mother do?

Kate Moss: Nothing, really, at the moment.

- Exchange in Vanity Fair, 1994

But the story doesnt quite start in Sanderstead.

Her mother, Linda Rosina Moss was born on the 8th September 1947. Linda was a local girl; her parents lived in Anthony Road, Woodside, about a mile from central Croydon, just three streets from where she would marry and then have Kate.

Lindas mothers maiden name was Emily Louisa Cresswell. Her father, George Frederick Shepherd, was a retail greengrocer. Unlike that other greengrocers daughter, Margaret Thatcher, Linda failed to rise to the challenge of humble origins. As a child and teenager, and then a wife and mother she lacked ambition. Her greatest achievement was to run a boutique when she was 23. Later in life, in her surprise role as a supermodels mum, she was prickly about her status as a casual shop worker and bar attendant. (When asked what her mother did for a living Kate would be evasive or giggle: Shell kill me for telling you!) When Linda married Peter Moss she was selling hair accessories for Carmen.