In Depth
Gathering Moss
14.08.08 Alice O'Keeffe
With a global recession looming the autumn of 2008 might not seem like the best time to publish a book about something as frivolous as fashion. But when the subject is supermodel and style icon Kate Moss, it starts to look like a very sensible decision indeed. Especially as the potential readership extends to anyone who has ever picked up a magazine simply because Moss was on the cover.
Angela Buttolph, author of Kate Moss: Style (Century, October, £20, h/b), elegantly dressed as befits a fashion journalist and of distinctly model-esque proportions herself—although with absolutely none of the hauteur—has been following Moss' career since the beginning: "I’ve been writing for fashion magazines since 1994 and from the word go I was writing about Kate. I’ve always been completely fascinated by her." Part of Moss' appeal is her colourful private life, well-documented in the tabloids, but Buttolph's focus in this book is strictly on her style: "There are four or five books out there already that cover the wilder side of her life. I wanted to do a book that was just about the fashion aspect. As far as Kate Moss is concerned she is fashion, a personification of the industry, and that's why she's interesting, especially for a fashion writer."
The lavishly illustrated book covers Kate Moss' career, from her first photo shoot as a Croydon schoolgirl aged 14 to the present day. Yet readers should not expect a how-to guide to replicating Kate’s style: "There was a really obvious way of doing it which was 'here’s how to do festival dressing, here’s how to do red-carpet dressing', but I really didn’t want to take that magazine-y approach." As Buttolph states in the introduction, the book is an attempt to answer the question 'What makes a style icon?' Another pertinent question would be what is it about Kate Moss' style that has women of all ages desperate to know more, and likely to read a 200-page book rather than flick through a magazine? "I think it's partly that [her style] is very translatable but also it's so original. She never ever follows trends and she’s slightly obsessive about not doing that. She's very much an innovator fashion-wise, so you always look at her and you think a) that's new and I hadn’t thought of that, and b) you're wearing that to the pub so I can wear that too. It's a brilliant combination of accessibility and being completely inspirational."
It's Buttolph's first solo book although she was a contributor to the influential The Fashion Book (Phaidon, 1998) and co-wrote How To Look Good Naked (HarperCollins, 2007) with Gok Wan. The whole project was a labour of love, although the writing of the book didn't go according to plan: "I started in September 2007 and my fantasy was that I'd spend a few months researching and then in the New Year start writing. That didn’t happen at all, actually. I spent the whole time doing research."
As a journalist used to weekly deadlines she found it "an incredible luxury" to devote nearly a year to researching, thinking and writing about her subject. With her flat covered in "a thousand photos" she jokes that "if anything had happened to [Kate] I’d have been prime suspect number one".
It is the photographs that drive the book, and give it the appeal to a wider market. With one of the world's most photographed women there was always going to be an embarrassment of riches: "There are pictures that are gorgeous and so you want to use them, and then there are pictures that are really iconic so you want to use them, and then also you want pictures that people haven’t seen before."
But, she stresses, it’s not just a collection of nice photographs: "I was really concerned with telling the story behind her style so a lot of the time we’d include a picture that wasn't the greatest picture in the world but there was a brilliant story about the dress. My main focus was where she was at style-wise in that particular era."
Buttolph spoke to numerous designers, stylists and vintage dealers ("no one had a bad word to say about her") and is very proud that all the sources are credited. "We haven’t got any quotes in there that are 'a friend said'. It's all straight from the horse's mouth." Happy as people were to speak on the record, she notes with a laugh that it was still "a nightmare dealing with people in fashion. It takes months and months just to get five minutes on the phone."
She didn't manage to speak to Kate herself although she did approach her modelling agency: "Halfway through [the writing of the book], when we were having chats with her agency, I did think 'I’m not quite sure how you would fit into this book now' because it’s about other people's perspectives."
Fortunately, a worldwide cuttings search yielded an impressive 30 or so interviews Moss had given to the press, "which was interesting because I think we all thought she’d done two or three". It meant Buttolph was "able to add first-person stuff as well, which really showed where she felt she was at".
Ultimately, Buttolph’s hope for the book is that readers will learn to think about fashion the way Kate does, rather than slavishly mimicking her latest outfit: "It’s not a style guide but a kind of fashion education. It's like a mini-version of the fashion education Kate had.
"You can do it in less then 20 years. And sadly, without the salary," she laughs.
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