Kate Moss opens up about her iconic Calvin Klein shoot
Legendary model Kate Moss has always been famously tight-lipped when it comes to the media, rarely agreeing to be interviewed. For the first time now she opens up in a rare in-depth filmed Interview about her early beginnings as a model, her iconic 1993 campaign for Calvin Klein’s Obsession perfume and her relationship with photographer Mario Sorrenti.
Speaking with legendary photographer, collaborator and friend Nick Knight for ShowStudio (as part of a series of candid model interviews), the 40-year old revealed the story behind the iconic photograph of her lying nude on a couch that eventually helped her land one of her first huge campaigns as the face of Calvin Klein Obsession.
Playing anxiously with a long necklace and wearing dark sunglasses and Moss revealed that Calvin Klein had recognized that photographer Mario Sorrenti, Moss’s then-boyfriend, was “obsessed” with her from the intimate pictures that filled his book and enlisted him to capture her on a holiday that the company arranged.
“Calvin was clever, he saw from the pictures that it was obsession, and it really was an obsession,” she said. “I’d wake up in the morning and he’d be taking pictures of me. I was like, ‘Fuck off!’ I lay like that [naked on a couch] for 10 days. He would not stop taking pictures of that. But, he’s Italian, you know? He was like, ‘Lay down, I’ll tell you when we’ve got it!’ We probably had it in the first roll. They rented us a house, just me and him and loads of film, in this deserted little shack on the beach.”
But the shoot she explains took a toll on their relationship and led to its demise. “We split up after that. When you’re in a relationship with a photographer and they start abusing that relationship – and being like, ‘I want you to do this, and I want you to do that’ – it makes you go, ‘No’. I didn’t want to work all the time, but he’d be like ‘Get up on the roof, take your clothes off,’ and I would think, ‘F*ck off! Now I understand that kind of thing a bit better, capturing an image, but at the time I was 17”she added.
Speaking of her rise to fame Moss reflects on how she moved to New York and also credits Francesca, Sorrenti’s mother as the person who took care of her. “I worked with Herb Ritts on the Marky Mark shoot, and then Steven Meisel, and then they’d start sending limos for me, and I was like, ‘That is so embarrassing. I’m not getting in a stretch limo by myself to go to a shoot.’ That whole New York thing of, ‘You are fabulous! Turn up to a Meisel shoot in a limo and you’re fabulous!’ I was wearing trainers and a ripped Margiela skirt, total grunge. I didn’t feel right at all. But then I made friends: Naomi and Christy took me under their wing, and then I met Johnny, and then I didn’t feel like, ‘I’m sitting on my own in a big stretch limo,’ because they all had stretch limos!”
At one point in the interview Knight suggests that no one apart from perhaps Marilyn Monroe or Jackie Kennedy has occupied the same volume of headlines or visual space, to which Moss responded with her signature wit: “Of course there has. Kerry Katona. Or Katie Price. I never think: ‘I’m in the papers all the time, because there are loads of people who are in the papers all the time.”
