A new Day dawnsRobin Muir looks back at a seminal Kate Moss shoot, Vogue March 1993Ever since Marianne Faithfull, Julie Christie and Jane
Birkin entered the scene in the 1960s, the London
Girl has been eclectic, bohemian and routinely,
gratifyingly unpredictable. As London swung again
in the ’90s, she was back, “shovelling Union Jacks and tiaras
onto the kind of slightly-too-short jackets and stovepipe
trousers that always go down well with a certain kind of
British girl,” observed Vogue’s Lisa Armstrong. Cool Britannia
was personified by the likes of Cecilia Chancellor and Bella
Freud from haute bohemian west London.
But it was the 5ft 6½in, south London-born Kate Moss who,
at just 19, exemplified fashion’s new spirit best of all. Here,
shorn of the text, is her first cover for British Vogue, taken by
model-turned-photographer Corinne Day. “She was just this
cocky kid from Croydon,” recalled Day. “She wasn’t like amodel... but I knew she was going to be famous.” There would
be, at last count, 42 more Kate Moss covers for British Vogue.
Back then, Day’s stripped-back “anti-fashion” aesthetic was
a novelty. The prestige of Vogue meant little to her, and she
would produce photographs only on her own terms. It worked.
Relaxing the rules meant a hesitant teenager could wear for
her first cover a pale pink and ice-blue tweed bustier by Chanel
(£1,900 with matching jacket), or an old eiderdown, as she did
three issues later, and look like a fashion icon in the making.
Every London girl who’s followed is compared to Moss,
but in truth none has whatever it is she has. Twenty-seven
years on, she remains one of the most recognisable faces of
our times, an enigmatic sphinx who has, famously, never
complained, never explained. And if the sphinx has a riddle,
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