return to worldwidereview.com,
the home of critical reviews
From: blp Category: Consumer Date: 01 September 2006 Time: 02:06 PM Review: Mosses crosses the once impassible divide between fashion and glamour modelling. As part of her apparent quest to colonise all possible public space, she's now to be found even in a notoriously stupid, ugly, undesirable bit. The left used to have a style monopoly on the kind of hip suavity Moss represents, but then that very hipness ain't worth a damn if it's too earnestly scrutable: Moss duly takes up her position in the place of ur-right-wing dolly-bird victimhood with the same vague, tough, opaquely cool stare she brings to everything else she does. What can it possibly mean? Why does it make me feel ill? I've never been interested in Moss at all before this, except for an anecdote about her neatly wrongfooting Jeremy Clarkson at some random celebrity velvet rope event. 'Kate, I wanna get you on Top Gear', she reports him saying. Her zoned out, monotone reply: 'I don't need any drugs.' The tabloids bigged this up as proof of Moss' stupidity. Moss' side of the story was told, insouciantly, as a bit of impish spoofery, months later to a sympathetic Guardian journalist. She didn't seem to care what anyone actually thought and wasn't, apparently, issuing a frantic denial - just laughing from some airily unassailable position of cool about the stupidity of everyone else involved. Clear battle lines seemed to be delineated - simplistic tabloid hysterics vs lefty broadsheet, tasteless retrograde big bloke idiot vs sagacious gamine nymph - and the winners seemed absolutely clear too. Ah clarity. The main thing is not to strive for clarity Of course it turned out, in a twist of Proustian micro-historical irony, she did need drugs.That Guardian piece of yesteryear was one of those bits of cut-and-paste punditry where the writer reassures us about the celebrity sex object along the lines of, 'She is absolutely savvy and completely in control of her own destiny.' But the story itself, with its punning foreshadowing of Moss' later Pete Doherty related notoriety, is about her as un-reassuring unknown quantity - just as this Page 3 business is, at a deeper level of the onion. Last time it was just Jeremy Oafson who came a cropper. This time, as she apparently switches side to tabloid's friend, it's a lot more of us.