The model opens up about her early days of modeling, the pressure she felt working in the industry and the nervous breakdown it led to when she was just 17 years old in the December issue of ‘Vanity Fair.’
Kate Moss may be a household name, but when she was just a young girl in the modeling world she felt very pressured — and she was never comfortable with taking her clothes off at such a young age. “I see a 16-year-old now, and to ask her to take her clothes off would feel really weird. But they were like, If you don’t do it, then we’re not going to book you again. So I’d lock myself in the toilet and cry and then come out and do it,” she said.
“I never felt very comfortable about it. There’s a lot of boobs. I hated my boobs! Because I was flat-chested. And I had a big mole on one. That picture of me running down the beach—I’ll never forget doing that, because I made the hairdresser, who was the only man on the shoot, turn his back,” she said regarding her work posing nude for Corinne Day.
One of Kate’s most iconic campaigns was her ad with Mark Wahlberg for Clavin Klein underwear in the ’90s, where she’s topless and straddling his legs while they both are wearing the brand’s jeans and undergarments — but most people don’t know the toll it took on the young model.
“I had a nervous breakdown when I was 17 or 18, when I had to go and work with Marky Mark. It didn’t feel like me at all. I felt really bad about straddling this buff guy. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t get out of bed for two weeks. I thought I was going to die. I went to the doctor, and he said, ‘I’ll give you some Valium,’ and Francesca Sorrenti, thank God, said, ‘You’re not taking that.’ It was just anxiety. Nobody takes care of you mentally. There’s a massive pressure to do what you have to do. I was really little, and I was going to work with Steven Meisel. It was just really weird—a stretch limo coming to pick you up from work. I didn’t like it. But it was work, and I had to do it.”
