God Save The Queen

Kate Moss was a mess. Everyone knew it. The coke, the bathroom incidents, the whole Pete Doherty disaster—it was all documented, all real. But somehow that wasn’t the interesting part. The interesting part was that despite being a complete wreck, she was still one of the most compelling people in fashion. Still is, honestly.

In 2002 Craig McDean shot her for i-D Magazine. The series was called God Save The Queen, which felt right—she looked like she needed saving, or maybe like she was already beyond it. The photographs were something else though. Gaunt, sharp, lit so brutally you couldn’t hide anything. She looked like she’d been awake for a week. She looked like she didn’t care what you thought. That’s the thing about Moss—she had this quality where the wreckage and the appeal were the same thing.

I’ve always been drawn to people like that. There’s something about not apologizing, about being exactly as broken as you are and just walking around anyway. Most people crash and that’s it, they become a punchline and disappear. Moss made the crash itself part of the mystique. She was famous partly because of the mess, not despite it.

By the time that shoot happened she’d already lived a few different lives. Model, scandal, icon, whatever she was becoming next. And she was still working, still unavoidable. You’d see her and you couldn’t quite figure out if she was bulletproof or if she was falling apart in real time and just didn’t care which.

The i-D photographs hold up. They’re the kind of thing you come back to. There’s something true in them that got missed by all the tabloid stuff. You see what made her matter. And you also see exactly why it all came apart.