In her most revealing interview to date, the notoriously press shy Kate Moss tells Vanity Fair about how she suffered a nervous breakdown as a teenager after her iconic 1992 Calvin Klein shoot with Marky Mark.
“I had a nervous breakdown when I was 17 or 18, when I had to go and work with Marky Mark and Herb Ritts,” she explains to Vanity Fair contributor James Fox. “It didn’t feel like me at all. I felt really bad about straddling this buff guy. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t get out of bed for two weeks. I thought I was going to die. I went to the doctor, and he said, ‘I’ll give you some Valium,’ and Francesca Sorrenti, thank God, said, ‘You’re not taking that.’ It was just anxiety.”
Moss continues about the struggles she faced as a young model. “Nobody takes care of you mentally. There’s a massive pressure to do what you have to do. I was really little, and I was going to work with Steven Meisel. It was just really weird—a stretch limo coming to pick you up from work. I didn’t like it. But it was work, and I had to do it.”
The British supermodel also talks about how uncomfortable she was with herself and her body when she posed nude for her famous black and white photo shoot with Corinne Day for The Face. “I see a 16-year-old now, and to ask her to take her clothes off would feel really weird. But they were like, If you don’t do it, then we’re not going to book you again,” Moss says. “So I’d lock myself in the toilet and cry and then come out and do it. I never felt very comfortable about it. There’s a lot of boobs. I hated my boobs! Because I was flat-chested. And I had a big mole on one. That picture of me running down the beach—I’ll never forget doing that, because I made the hairdresser, who was the only man on the shoot, turn his back.”
Moss opens up about leading the “heroin chic” movement after those now-classic photos skyrocketed her to fame. “I had never even taken heroin—it was nothing to do with me at all. I think Corinne—she wasn’t on heroin but always loved that Lou Reed song, that whole glamorizing the squat, white-and-black and sparse and thin, and girls with dark eyes.”
As for the constant rumors of eating disorders, Moss denies she ever had anorexia. “I was thin, but that’s because I was doing shows, working really hard. At that time, I was staying at a B and B in Milan, and you’d get home from work and there was no food. You’d get to work in the morning, there was no food. Nobody took you out for lunch when I started. Carla Bruni took me out for lunch once. She was really nice. Otherwise, you don’t get fed. But I was never anorexic. They knew it wasn’t true—otherwise I wouldn’t be able to work.”
Moss is currently married to her husband of more than one year, The Kills frontman Jamie Hince, but she also shared details of her brief but intense romance with actor Johnny Depp. “There’s nobody that’s ever really been able to take care of me. Johnny did for a bit. I believed what he said,” Moss says. “Like if I said, ‘What do I do?,’ he’d tell me. And that’s what I missed when I left. I really lost that gauge of somebody I could trust. Nightmare. Years and years of crying. Oh, the tears!”
Times have changed for the once bad girl model. “I don’t really go to clubs anymore. I’m actually quite settled. Living in Highgate with my dog and my husband and my daughter! I’m not a hell-raiser. But don’t burst the bubble. Behind closed doors, for sure I’m a hell-raiser.”
Moss’ full interview can be read in the December issue of Vanity Fair.