Kate Moss opens up to Vanity Fair about modeling misery

She was young and beautiful and didn’t like posing nude.

NEW YORK:

If you hate having your picture taken, you’re in good company — British supermodel Kate Moss does as well. “I’m terrible at a snapshot. Terrible! I blink all the time. I’ve got facial Tourette’s [neurological disorder characterised by repetitive, stereotyped, involuntary movements and vocalisations called tics],” she told Vanity Fair in the December issue, which was published on Wednesday.

Moss, who has graced countless magazine covers and was emblematic of the waif look popular in the 1990s, added “Unless I’m working and in that zone, I’m not very good at pictures.”

Moss, 38, opened up about her years spent before the camera, including now-legendary shoots that left her anxious, demoralised, and hungry.

Among her regrets is a 1992 Calvin Klein session that helped launched Moss’ career.

She recalled the shoot, at age 17 or 18, with Mark Wahlberg (then going by his rapper name, Marky Mark) and photographer Herb Ritts.

“I had a nervous breakdown,” she said. “It [the job] 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.”

“It was just anxiety,” she added. “Nobody takes care of you mentally. There’s a massive pressure to do what you have to do [and] I was really little ... I didn’t like it. But it was work, and I had to do it.”

When she was even younger, she posed nude for The Face — yet another regret.

“Now I think, to ask a 16-year-old to take her clothes off would feel really weird,” Moss said sadly. “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.”

Moss, who became associated with the “heroin chic” look after her early shoots, said “I had never even taken heroin — it was nothing to do with me at all.”

“I was thin,” she conceded. “But that’s because I was doing shows, working really hard. You’d get home from work and there was no food. You’d get to work in the morning, there was no food — you don’t get fed!”

Moss has kind words for her time with Johnny Depp in the mid-1990s, when she said she felt taken care of. After their break-up in 1998, “I really lost that gauge of somebody I could trust.” Moss described her pain: “Nightmares! Years and years of crying.”

Now, she says, her years of partying and high living have ebbed. She married guitarist Jamie Hince in 2011 after a four-year romance. “I don’t real¬ly go to clubs anymore. I’m actually quite settled.”

“Living in Highgate [in London] with my dog and my husband and my daughter, I’m not a hell-raiser.”  She added, “Still — don’t burst the bubble. Behind closed doors, for sure I’m a hell-raiser.” 

Published in The Express Tribune, November 1^st, 2012.            

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