Kate Moss, Still

Kate Moss is on the new Playboy cover. She’s 39, the magazine’s hitting its 60th anniversary, and the photograph is drenched in retouching—which is just standard now. Every woman past a certain age gets digitally rebuilt, the whole apparatus pretending that this is flattery instead of erasure.

But Kate Moss has always been one of those people who never really disappear. She was the 90s icon, then the Pete Doherty thing for a few years, and now she’s just still here. There’s something mechanical about how it works. Once you’ve mattered enough, you’re inoculated against irrelevance. You can bring her back every few years and it still sells magazines because she doesn’t age out of the culture the way people are supposed to.