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We highlight Kate Moss who is not just a model in the sense of being behind the lens, but also a model of modernity. Unique in her genre, Kate Moss's face and body have been scrutinized from all angles by the eye of fashion photographers but also artists, who express the larger meaning of her public appeal.
It is safe to say that Kate Moss is a living icon. “Kate is probably second only to Marilyn Monroe as the subject most often represented in works of art,” remarked Chuck Close in a 2007 interview with Luxuryculture.com. But she is also a hard-working, modern professional woman. Despite her low height for industry standards, humble origins and her boom on the fashion scene as the waif, anti-supermodel of the 1990s in an early Calvin Klein ad, she has become the second highest paid model with nearly every important fashion brand associated with her image.
Kate Moss never appears the same in any effigy that emerges of her. She changes, chameleon-like, for each paprazzi photograph, each encounter with a renowned artist, each fashion campaign or magazine cover (of which she counts 300, comprising 26 for British Vogue alone).
The manner in which she inspires artists, particularly, seems to fall into two categorizations: ultra-realistic, with flaws and bumps and all, or, goddess-like with the associated mystery, enigma and untouchable otherworldliness. Representations by artists Chuck Close and Lucian Freud can be said to be of the former camp, interpretations by fashion legend Alexander McQueen and sculptor Mark Quinn, the latter.
Diverging from his signature grid system portraits, Chuck Close produced an edition of daguerreotypes (an early photographic process) later transformed into Jacquard tapestries that reveal Moss as she humanly is, with no make-up and skin flaws. Close noted that she never once looked at the mirror, declaring there are already enough beautiful pictures of her, which indicated she knew exactly what her role was in collaboration with Close. The representation, far from her concurrent presence on glossy pages, sold at Christie’s in London in May 2006 for five times over its pre-sale estimate.
Just a year earlier in 2005, again with Christie's in London, a reclining nude portrait of the model by artist Lucian Freud that was painted while she just a few months was pregnant, fetched £3.93 million. Entitled, discreetly, Naked Portrait 2002, it was the result of a series of late-night sittings. Freud has formerly stated that he rarely likes to use professional models because they have have "grown another skin because they have been looked at so much". Yet perhaps, and remarkably so, this is not the case for Kate Moss which allowed her to be stripped bare, again, in this encounter.
The fashionable sister institution to the Louvre, Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris, had planned an exhibition in 2010 exploring the "myth” of Kate Moss; it was cancelled due to lack of sponsorship and postponed until March, 2011. Kate Moss carries a mysterious air about her, even her personal life is captivating; she is soft spoken and troubled, a bit like Marilyn Monroe was in her time, though Moss’s professionalism has seemed to carry her through. Artist Banksy was quick to directly express this common comparison by replacing Monroe’s face with Moss’s face in a 2005 appropriation of the famous Andy Warhol silkscreen.
The late British fashion designer Alexander McQueen depicted the Kate Moss myth in his 2006 Fall/Winter Collection presented during Paris Fashion Week. A floating, life-size, 3-D hologram of Kate Moss in real-time movement appears ghost-like as she surrenders to the movement of sheer material about her. Audiences were capitivate by Kate Moss, ethereal.
Another representation of Kate Moss’s mystery is Mark Quinn’s sculptures series, including Sphinx and the gold-case Siren, based on Kate Moss. Based on photos, measurements and live casts of her body, Quinn twisted her likeness into advanced yoga poses, which he calls the “knotted Venus of our age” referring to his intention to associate her – and our obsession with her – with the ancient goddess of love. The yoga poses carry another meaning as Quinn further explains how she is “twisted by our collective desires”; indeed, the ancient role of the gods.
Quinn is fascinated by her as an archetypal image. While Sphinx is a bronze cast then painted white, the sculpture Siren weighs about as much as the supermodel herself, being covered in pure gold, costing 2.8 million USD ; it is believed to be the largest gold statue made in the world since Ancient Egyptian times, and likely intended to join the Western art canon as representative of our age.
As a creature who is admired and observed obsessively, she is nonetheless very much of the things of her time, a living definition of modernity. Professionally expanding her personal ‘brand’ by creating a perfume with Coty, editing French Vogue for a month, designing for Topshop and Longchamp, she follows the music of the moment and the best parties.
Kate Moss, the woman, is real and complex perhaps no more than any other woman. But Kate Moss, the image, expresses the depths of this reality – she is fragile and professional, sincere and seductive, complex and pure, changing and timeless. And this is perhaps what artists seek to capture or bring out in her – not the photographic likeness, but the deeper contrast of the reality or the myth of Kate Moss, with her body somewhere in between.
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