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KATE MOSS pondered the question for a moment. Her shoulders heaved forward to hold up a wisp of fabric in a print of white barbed wire that could qualify as a dress only on her. She gestured beyond the colossal security guards in three-piece suits, the scruffy entourage, the D.J. girls with the cropped platinum hair wearing her little dresses, the waiters clearing the detritus of broken Champagne glasses left in their wake and the sea of gawking news-media types whirling in the background with notepads in hand. Then she said what she wanted:
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Evan Agostini/Getty Images
‘MAGIC TOUCH’ Kate Moss at a party on Monday.
“The world of Kate.”
Ms. Moss touched the shoulder of Sir Philip Green, the British retail king who introduced the first collection of Kate Moss frocks at his Topshop chain in London last week and escorted her on Tuesday night to the seventh floor of Barneys New York for its American release. You’d have thought by the turnout that Queen Elizabeth had popped in for a white sale.
“I never told you that, did I?” Ms. Moss said, clearly to the delight of Sir Philip. “The world of Kate!”
The British press has not been entirely kind to Ms. Moss during her 19-year career. Setting aside for a moment the September 2005 news-media storm over images published in The Daily Mirror that indicated she had used cocaine, Ms. Moss’s debut as a designer was clobbered by the London papers. A sample headline from The Daily Mail last Wednesday: “Hysteria and the Great Kate Moss Con.”
But her fast transformation from working-class model to burgeoning brand name may be the most telling example of the current power of notoriety to sell clothes. Even Ms. Moss, who has cultivated an unparalleled mystique as a model who rarely reveals what is happening behind her beautiful facade, was visibly overwhelmed by the turnout of more than 1,000 customers for the Topshop introduction in London.
“I was a nervous wreck,” she said at Barneys. “I’ve always had a lot of attention to the way I dress. I don’t take that as a personal thing, like, ‘Oooh, they like me.’ They want a dress. Girls like clothes.”
Yesterday morning, surprisingly, there were fewer than 100 women waiting outside the Barneys store on Madison Avenue when it opened at 10 a.m. At the front of the line, sisters Brittney and Danielle Hershkowitz, 18 and 16 respectively, had been there for four hours.
“I think anything she wears, people want,” said Brittney Hershkowitz, standing before a window display that included a tiered black chiffon dress like the one Ms. Moss wore to the Costume Institute gala on Monday ($575). “She is very desirable, even after her drug scandal. I just don’t understand that. She’s supposed to be a role model for young children, so I’m shocked that so many people still stand behind her.” Still, Ms. Hershkowitz said she loved the model’s style and was intrigued by the paradox of her increasing success in the wake of the scandal.
“Personally, I forgave her,” she said, “but I thought I was the exception.”
So did many other women at Barneys, scooping up $20 henley tanks and floral chiffon baby-doll tops for $120. “That’s her own problem,” said Jane Ko, 31, a jewelry designer in Manhattan. “It’s more about her style for me. She has a magic touch. No matter what she wears, it’s fabulous.”
Ms. Moss’s problems may have humanized her in the minds of a public insatiable for celebrity gossip and yet sympathetic to the scrutiny under which celebrities must live. In Ms. Moss’s case, rising above the controversy has become part of her appeal, or perhaps an element of the brand. When Simon Doonan, the Barneys creative director, created an unintended stir by playfully describing Ms. Moss’s democratic appeal in The New York Post as “a working-class slag from a crap town, like me,” a British T-shirt company was selling “working-class slag” T-shirts for |
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发表于 2007-5-11 14:58:03
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