The Bones Do the Work

For Playboy’s 60th anniversary issue, Kate Moss got naked, or close enough to it. She was 39. She had survived the drug years, the tabloid years, the Pete Doherty years—which were substantially the same years—and here she was on the cover anyway, as if none of it had required much effort on her part.

Sitting with a glass of whisky in one hand and a tube of spray cheese in the other—and yes, there are moods that require exactly that combination—flipping through the preview shots felt less like an occasion and more like confirmation of something already known. Some Photoshop had clearly been involved. It didn’t matter. The bones were doing the work, same as they always had.

There’s a version of this where you write about what it means that a nearly 40-year-old model is the anniversary Playboy cover—the industry, age, visibility, all that. That argument exists and it isn’t nothing. But it mistakes what Kate Moss is. She’s not a statement. She’s not making a point. She’s just Kate Moss, doing whatever she wants, with the same total indifference to expectations she’s had since she was 14 in a Calvin Klein ad. You can write theory around her or you can just look. I know which one I’m doing.