The Ongoing Case for Kate Moss

There’s a certain category of celebrity who transcends the usual mechanics of fame—who becomes less a person than a recurring visual argument. Kate Moss is that. She’s been a tabloid fixture, a fashion icon, a cautionary tale about cocaine, and the subject of approximately ten thousand photographs for thirty years, and somehow the accumulation doesn’t diminish her. It compounds her.

Mario Testino put out Kate Moss by Mario Testino through TASCHEN—private shots, candid moments, the kind of access that only a long collaboration produces. The original collector’s edition cost something obscene; this version landed at around thirty euros. The images accumulate into something that reads less like a monograph than a document of mutual obsession. She’s clearly aware of every camera in every room she enters, which should make candid shots impossible, and yet somehow they work.

I’ve always found her more compelling as a subject than as a model. Which probably says something about both of us.