Photo by Annie Leibovitz
Like most fashion fanatics, we can’t get enough of Kate Moss, so when it was announced that her book Kate: The Kate Moss Book was coming out in December we were thrilled. Who wouldn’t want to read about the trials and tribulations of the most famous model of our time?
We were also thrilled to hear that the famously media-shy model opened up to Vanity Fair (she’s the December cover girl) about her early career — namely, her iconic 1992 Calvin Klein underwear ad where she appeared nude. “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 said. “It didn’t feel like me at all. I felt really bad 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 [Moss’ friend and mother of Mario Sorrenti], thank God, said: ‘You’re not taking that.'”
While the Moss we see in the media seems free spirited and up for anything, it obviously wasn’t always that way. “I see a 16-year-old now, and to ask her to take her clothes off would feel really weird,” she noted. “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.”
Luckily for her, her then-boyfriend Johnny Depp (they dated from 1994 to 1997) helped her deal with fame. “There’s nobody that’s ever really been able to take care of me. Johnny did for a bit. I believed what he said. 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,” she explained.
To read the full cover story on Kate Moss, check out December’s Vanity Fair.