[imagesource: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images/AFP]
Kate Moss, who was scouted on a flight from New York to London when she was 14, has had decades of experience in the modelling and fashion industry.
But models who shot to fame in the ’90s, like Moss, did so in the midst of a terribly toxic culture of misogyny, exploitation, and disordered eating.
That Victoria’s Secret Angels and Demons doccie that has been revealing the hidden skeletons of the industry at large is a case in point, too.
Now 48, the British supermodel is reflecting back on some of the more uncomfortable moments that, admittedly, shaped her career and herself.
She revealed exactly how she felt during that iconic and provocative 1992 Calvin Klein photo shoot that helped skyrocket her to fame in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs programme.
She said that straddling Mark Wahlberg (known back then by his rap moniker, Marky Mark) with her boobs pressed against him, left her feeling objectified, “vulnerable and scared”, NewsAU reported:
Moss, who previously told Vanity Fair that she hated having to press her naked breasts against Wahlberg and called him a “d**khead” in a 2012 interview with Glenn O’Brien, told Desert Island Discs’ host Lauren Laverne that her memories of the shoot itself were “not very good”.
“It was all about him. He had a big entourage – and I was just this tiny model … I was quite young and innocent,” she said, adding that Wahlberg, a “buff guy”, “was very macho”.
“I think they played on my vulnerability … I really didn’t feel well before the shoot. For a week or two I didn’t get out of bed – I had severe anxiety and the doctor gave me Valium.”
In 2020, Wahlberg admitted that he wasn’t very “worldly” back then and may have been “rough around the edges” at the time of the shoot.
Moss also recalled an earlier moment of “horrible” discomfort, when she went for a bra catalogue shoot at age 15 and ran away after the sexual predator-like photographer asked her to remove her clothes, per IOL:
Moss said: “He said, ‘Take your top off’, and I took my top off, and I was really shy then about my body.
“And he said, ‘Take your bra off’, and I could feel there was something wrong, so I got my stuff and I ran away.”
Despite being shaken by the incident, Moss thinks it “sharpened” her instincts and she can now “tell a wrong ’un from a mile away”.
Besides shooting to fame for her own contributions to the fashion industry, Moss also set up a modelling agency which she says protects the models and gives them a lot more power over their career choices.
She has also advised her 19-year-old daughter Lila, who is following in her footsteps, that she does not have to do anything that she is uncomfortable with.
