Kate Moss has admitted that she “cried a lot” after posing topless for a photoshoot when she was aged just 15.
The model, now 50, appeared in a famous cover shoot for The Face magazine in 1990, captured by the photographer Corrine Day and featuring the headline “The Third Summer of Love”.
The published photos included a shot of the then-teenager standing in front of the sea at Camber Sands in east Sussex, only wearing a dark skirt and a feathered headdress.
The shoot helped to launch Moss’s modelling career, but in a new interview with her close friend Bella Freud, the fashion icon revealed that she “never wanted” to pose semi-naked, and that the experience left her tearful afterwards.
Appearing on the latest episode of Freud’s Fashion Neurosis podcast, Moss recalled how “at a very young age, I started working and I started doing pictures topless.
“And I was very conscious, I have a mole on my right t** and I hated it so much I would cry.
“I never wanted to be topless. I would cry and I had to get over it because the photographer would be like, ‘If you don’t do this, I’m not going to book you for the next job’, so I had to get over it.”
When fashion designer Freud asked her friend if she was referring to her work with Day, Moss agreed, and explained that the images led to her brother being mocked by his peers.
“I was 15 and I was topless in a magazine and I was still at school,” she said. “Luckily The Face wasn’t sold in Croydon, so I don’t think anyone really saw it, but they heard. They took the piss out of my brother. ‘Your sister’s got her t**s out.’ I think he probably suffered more than I did about it.”
Moss went on to reveal that she felt “really shy” at the time, but said that Day and her team felt “like family”.
“I’d worked with them so many times already that I knew them really well,” she explained. “But I still, even after that shoot, I did cry a lot about taking my clothes off with her. I really didn’t want to do it.”
Moss and Day would go on to work together on numerous occasions, collaborating on a controversial 1993 Vogue editorial that was criticised for allegedly glamourising so-called “heroin chic”.
Day died of a brain tumour in 2010 at the age of 45.
The model previously revisited her complicated relationship with Day in her 2022 appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, telling host Lauren Laverne: “She was my best friend and I really loved her but she was a very tricky person to work with.
“But, you know, the pictures are amazing, so she got what she wanted and I suffered for them but, in the end, they did me the world of good. I mean, they did change my career.”
