Kate Moss has opened up about running away from a photoshoot at the age of 15 after a man asked her to remove her bra. The supermodel recalled the incident in a new appearance on Desert Island Discs, telling host Lauren Laverne that the experience had “sharpened her instincts”.
Moss signed to the Storm modelling agency in 1988, after she was scouted at 14 years old. Moss recalled attending castings across London using an A-Z atlas.
“I had a horrible experience for a bra catalogue. I was only 15, probably, and he said, ‘Take your top off’ and I took my top off. And I was really shy then about my body,” she explained. “And he said ‘Take your bra off,’ and I could feel there was something wrong, so I got my stuff and I ran away.”
Moss continued: “I think it sharpened my instincts. I can tell a wrong ’un a mile away.”
The model’s earliest editorial covers were for Face magazine in 1990, when she was 16. The model appeared on the cover twice that year, first in May and again in July.
Speaking about the July cover, which was shot by late photographer Corinne Day, Moss said it was a “painful” memory.
“That scrunched up nose that is on the cover, she would say, ‘Snort like a pig’ to get that picture,” she said of Day. “And I would be like, ‘I don’t want to snort like a pig,’ and she would be like, ‘Snort like a pig, that’s when it looks good.’”
In one photograph from the shoot, Moss appears naked but covers her body using her hands and a beach hat. In another, she appears topless wearing a feathered headdress.
Moss said she “cried a lot” during the shoot because she didn’t feel comfortable posing naked. “I didn’t want to take my top off. I was really, really self-conscious about my body, and she would say, ‘If you don’t take your top off I am not going to book you for Elle,’ and I would cry,” she claimed.
“It is quite difficult. It is painful because 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 a world of good really. They did change my career.”
Moss founded her own modelling agency in 2016, through which she manages her 19-year-old daughter Lila. She said she uses her experiences to ensure that Lila and other models have a more comfortable experience than her own.
“I have said to [Lila], ‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,’” she said. “If you don’t want to do this shoot, if you don’t feel comfortable, if you don’t want to model, don’t do it.”
She explained: “I take care of my models. I make sure they are with agents at shoots, so when they are being taken advantage of, there is someone there to say, ‘I don’t think that’s appropriate.’ I don’t know if that’s across the board, but that’s what I can do.”
Elsewhere during the interview, Moss spoke candidly about feeling like a “scapegoat” during the early 2000s, when she faced criticism for “glorifying” a thin body shape and drug use in a style known as “heroin chic”.
