The once ultra-skinny fashion model Kate Moss now refutes that was the poster girl for the heroin chic movement in fashion advertising.
The phrase “heroin chic” was coined back in the 1990’s to describe the proliferation of ultra-skinny and very pale young female fashion models that seemed to be included in every other print and television advertisement for high-fashion clothing and accessories at the time. Far from being just thin models, the girls in the heroin chic lineup really did look very unhealthy. They were skeleton-thin and many even had big dark circles under their eyes. None looked very happy either, as the favorite facial expression preferred by the advertising directors at the time seemed to be a vaguely depressed look with a distinctively vacant stare completing the picture. The trend continued unabated for years until enough members of the public and some of the fashion press started remarking that not only did the models not represent what girls and women in the U.S. really look like in real life, most of the waif-like girls in fashion advertising actually did look like heroin addicts that were suffering from a lack of food, sleep and nutrition, and they also looked like they were very sick.
Unfortunately for the fashion icon and supermodel Kate Moss, who was a top pick for a great many fashion ads back in those days, her thin frame and pale appearance combined with a behind the scenes reputation as a wild, ultra skinny girl who partied too much, earned her a solid spot in the crop of heroin chic models at the time. Now, Moss has revisited her past in an article in the current December 2012 issue of Vanity Fair magazine in which she opens up about those days when she was the poster girl for the heroin chic movement.
In the article the 38-year-old model talks about starting out her career in the modeling world at a very young age and admits she had real problems with some of the photo shoots she was uncomfortable with back in those days. Moss says it was the many requests for her to appear topless in fashion ads that she had the biggest problems with. Moss described her dilemma saying “There was great pressure to go topless, and I never felt very comfortable about it, but if you don’t do it, then they’re not going to book you again.”
The fashion superstar describes her early career as being very difficult for a young girl to handle and admits there were many problems, however, she says one thing that was never a problem for her at all was heroin or any other type of drug addiction. Moss says the notion that heroin addiction is chic is foreign to her and there is nothing she can see that is attractive about real drug addiction at all. In fact, she maintains that the entire concept that there was anything “chic” about models using heroin was simply totally false. Moss asserts in the Vanity Fair article that "I had never even taken heroin - it was nothing to do with me at all. I was thin, but that's because I was doing shows, working really hard. You'd get home from work and there was no food. You'd get to work in the morning, there was no food and you just don't get fed." Now, Moss says her years of partying and poor diets have faded into the past and she is happily married. As she says "I don't really go to clubs anymore. I'm actually quite settled." At the current age of 38, Moss now looks to be quite happy and healthy, and no one is suggesting that she has anything to do with heroin chic anymore.
