Post by bergerac on Apr 2, 2007 8:43:26 GMT -5
of clothing for topshop.Interview with amusing Pete references below.
.....................
Peter has claimed that he likes to try on Kate's clothes - how does that work ,big lad - wee tiny lass,her knickers must be like the Tardis.I'm sure he would be more comfortable in something from the Beth Ditto leisure range.
.............................
del.interoute.com/?id=edf924b4-fb38-4624-9a62-2ad5cd6f3896&delivery=stream
.........................
From The Sunday Times
April 1, 2007
What Kate did next
She’s the supermodel who became an icon — but now she’s selling more than just her image. As she launches her first collection for Topshop, Kate Moss talks exclusively to Sheryl Garratt about fashion, fame and why absolutely everyone wants a piece of her
Sheryl Garratt
Click on the related link below to view an audio slideshow of Kate Moss modelling the latest Topshop fashions
Lying on a sofa wearing her trademark fitted jeans, a fine grey V-neck sweater and just one sock, Kate Moss is demonstrating why one of her nicknames has long been Calamity Kate. The night before we met, a picture she had leaning against the wall at home had fallen down, she had trodden on it and gashed her sole open.
Like most things in Kate’s life, this incident would be reflected in the distorting mirror of the tabloids a day later, with pictures of her being carried to the car by her boyfriend, Pete Doherty, and speculation about an injured leg. Right now, though, it’s just a daft domestic accident that is stopping her walking. And it hurts.
“Honestly, I was crying this morning, I was in so much pain,” she says in a slightly husky voice that still shows its Croydon origins. “And I’m not a wuss at all.” She wiggles the foot by my face for inspection: it is horribly swollen, in ghastly shades of red, purple and yellow. Lila, her four-year-old daughter with publisher Jefferson Hack, had it about right: “Every time she sees it, she’s like, ‘Oh, that’s disgusting, Mummy.’”
Related Internet Links
* Style's fashion editor Sara Hassan gives her verdict on the clothes in a special multimedia slideshow
Nonetheless, Moss plans to get up at 5am tomorrow to catch a plane – three planes, in fact, with a four-hour stopover en route – to work in St Barts. “It’s a jewellery shoot,” she says, when I suggest that a long flight followed by a photoshoot may not be the best way to heal a swollen foot. “It’s not like I’ll have to run about or anything.” Besides, it’s the Caribbean and one of her mates is coming with her.
She makes it sound like a holiday. It’s only when I talk to her agency that I discover she’s doing two separate shoots and will be working solidly on the trip.
From the acres of newsprint dedicated to her, you’d think that Moss made her living from the sort of hedonistic activities that send tabloid headline writers wild. You rarely read about the Kate who has to be near-dead to cancel a shoot. The Kate who doesn’t just allow photographers and stylists to experiment, but will often push them further. The Kate who sat for a Lucian Freud portrait from 7pm to 2am at least three nights a week for eight months, and only once was 10 minutes late – the day she found out she was pregnant with Lila. Moss’s rep in the fashion business is as someone who works hard. I’ve known her professionally since 1989, when she started modelling for The Face, the magazine I then edited, and, unusually for someone at the top of her game, there has never been a whiff of diva-like behaviour from one of her shoots.
None of this is to suggest that Moss is perfect, of course. She would be the first to say as much. Even in her first shoots, with the photographer Corinne Day, she remembers moaning, “I don’t want to take my clothes off, it’s raining.” But she did, just as she once sat for hours near-naked on a horse on Bodmin Moor in the middle of winter for the photographer Juergen Teller, or spent a whole day swaying on a swing suspended from the studio ceiling for Nick Knight. (If this sounds easy, try pumping a swing for an hour and see how your stomach muscles feel. Then imagine doing it for nine more. Smiling.)
When I ask what makes her so driven, she says that maybe it was those early years, when she was struggling to establish herself. “I had to work hard to get out of Croydon. It wasn’t easy. I didn’t have it on a plate. When I could have been with my friends, just bunking off, I had to get on the Tube all over London, doing my eight castings a day, for four years. But I knew I had to work my arse off to do something with my life.”
Even after her big break as the face of Calvin Klein in 1992, Moss continued to do jobs back-to-back for weeks on end. Now, she no longer does the catwalk shows, and since Lila started school, she rarely travels in term time, reducing the amount of editorial work she does. “I like to put her to bed – that’s my thing.”
But when she does work, she does it properly. She tells me about a shoot the week before near her house in the country, which is clearly where she’s happiest. “I thought it would be so nice, that I could stay at home and not have to come to London, where it’s such a nightmare. But it was raining and freezing, there was a wind machine, smoke machines and I was on a trampoline in the middle of a field in a pair of knickers while everyone else had parkas, hats and gloves on. And I was like, ‘Oh, I can’t do this any more. I’m getting too old.’” She laughs, exposing those famously crooked teeth. “But I did do it, and we got the picture.”
Many models, when you meet them in person, resemble exotic giraffes: all long legs and angular features that look fabulous on camera, but slightly alien in real life. Moss looks just the same as her pictures, only with less make-up and a Marlboro Light in her hand. She is currently the face and body of, among others, Burberry, Versace, Agent Provocateur, Rimmel and Longchamp. The gamine 15-year-old of the early days may have grown into a self-assured 33-year-old, but Moss has never lost that mischievous air and remains at the centre of all that is cool in pop culture, equally at home watching a band in a grungy pub as in the front row at the shows. She is someone who has always appeared supremely comfortable in her own skin, sexy without being self-obsessed or intimidating and still, despite her fame, somehow accessible. She’s the Croydon girl made good, our Kate. Even when she’s at her most glamorous, you sense that she’d be a laugh, someone you might want as a mate. That she’s real.
And yet, there’s no ignoring the extraordinary mythology that surrounds her. It’s not just that her face peers out from magazines and billboards and is one of the most recognised in the world. It’s that her every move is the subject of scrutiny and speculation. What’s it like being this mythologised? “I’m so normal, really,” she says. “They portray me as all these crazy things, and I’m so not like that. I don’t have entourages, I’m as normal as you can get ...” She pauses, perhaps realising that flying to the Caribbean for work and being followed everywhere by a herd of paparazzi is nowhere near normal for most of us. “In this kind of lifestyle, I suppose. I try to be. I like to muck in, I don’t like to sit around. And if I can do something myself, I’ll do it.”
I ask how it feels to see yourself every time you open a magazine. She says she doesn’t even look any more. “It’s like a joke now. Yesterday, in the pub, we were going through a Sunday magazine and playing a game of, ‘Ooh, that’s me! And that’s me again!’ Because Pete will go, ‘Is that you?’ about any model in a magazine. And I’m like, ‘No, she’s Chinese.’ ‘Is that you?’ ‘No. She’s 12.’ It’s quite funny.” She hates being singled out for special treatment, giving as an example people who introduce everyone else present by their first names, but her as “Kate Moss,” just in case someone hasn’t noticed. She dislikes the word celebrity – “It gives me the fear,” she says with a shudder. “It’s horrible” – and though her image may be public property, she decided long ago that her personal life is not. Even when she was dragged through the tabloids, she kept her counsel where many would have been tempted to speak out.
But then, Moss never stopped doing interviews in order to cultivate some sphinx-like air of mystery, as is sometimes assumed. She stopped because she talks too much, she trusts too much, and makes jokes accompanied by deliciously dirty laughs that don’t translate well into print. Most of all, she simply doesn’t want to share her life with strangers. “Why would I want to talk about my private life?” she says, aghast. “No, not my cup of tea at all. I never, ever wanted to do that.”
So if she is talking now, it is because she has something specific to talk about. She has poured a lot of herself into the Kate Moss range that is about to be launched at Topshop. When I went to see the clothes – which are gorgeous, by the way, and so “Kate” that when I was looking at the samples on the rail, I half-expected her to pop out from behind it – the PR expressed surprise at how involved she has been, always in and out of the offices and refusing to even use a fitting model for the clothes, preferring to try them all herself. But Moss wouldn’t have been happy putting her name to any piece of clothing that didn’t feel hers. “I wanted to feel that I’d wear it,” she says, “that I liked it and wanted it.”
For me, the only surprise is that Moss didn’t do it years ago. “I’d talked about it with other people before, and it just hadn’t happened. But this just felt like the right time, with the right people. Before, I didn’t feel I could have given it my full attention. I was travelling so much. Now I’m a lot more grounded and settled, with Lila and everything. I’m here most of the time. And I’m really getting into it. I love it! Philip Green [the Topshop owner] has even said I can have an office. My own office! I want somewhere I can put my mood boards up.”
Only a girl who has lived out of suitcases for most of her adult life could be this excited about having an office to go to, but launching a clothing range is the logical next step for someone whose personal style is imitated all over the world. If Moss wears skinny jeans, then skinny jeans are what every girl wants. She’s done the same for pirate boots, denim hot pants, even festival wellies. When Green suggested that they do something together, she surprised him by saying yes immediately.
She’ll never be a fully-fledged designer, she says. “I can’t sketch. And I can’t make clothes.” But she knows how clothes should feel when she puts them on, she knows how they should fit, and from her first formal meeting with Green, she was clear what she could bring to the store. “I think they kind of copy me sometimes,” she says with modest understatement. “I mean, I’m sure they do it to a lot of people, but I do notice with me, they do it so quickly, and they do it so well. So I said, ‘I could give you my stamp, and you could get it direct.’”
The Kate Moss line will be a year-round collection that will change with the seasons, but have new pieces added all the time. There are fantastic evening dresses that will come in limited editions of 100 or 200, vintage-style day dresses in pretty prints, a jacket made of butter-soft leather (“I know, it’s gorge, isn’t it?”), rock-chick T-shirts, and lots of variations on the waistcoat that Moss more or less single-handedly put back on the fashion agenda. There are jeans, too, of course, branded with little embroidered swallows, hearts and stars – copies of her real tattoos – and a little swallow tag on the belt loop that can also be used as a bracelet. “I wore the jeans this weekend, and they’re quite good,” she says. “I don’t think we’ve got the fit quite perfect yet. But I can keep changing them. The whole range is going to get better and better.”
She brought in her friend, the stylist Katy England, to be a sounding board – and to make it more fun. “That’s what we do anyway, really. ‘What are we going to wear to Glastonbury? What are we going to wear to this party? Ooh, let’s get outfits together!’ Because it was my first time, I just went through my closet, basically. I was just like, ‘I’d love this, but altered like this’, or ‘I’d love that, but in a pinstripe.’ Like I put a waistcoat on with a bias-cut skirt and it looked good so we turned that into a dress.
“But it was a bit eclectic – just pieces I’d worn that I would love for spring/summer. The next one will be more like a story, a collection. I’m really excited about going out and finding things – not just taking stuff from my closet as it is now, but what my dream closet would be.”
Moss has had input into everything, from the design of the instore mini-boutiques, where the range will be displayed, to the ad campaign, which will feature Irina, a former girlfriend of Pete’s, who has since become Moss’s friend, too. “They haven’t said no to anything I wanted to do,” she enthuses. “I’ve said, ‘This isn’t good enough’, ‘This fabric doesn’t feel right, it’s too stiff’, or ‘This leather’s too shiny, it needs to be more matt’, and they’ve done it.”
But over the years, we’ve all come to trust Moss’s taste. Even in her early Face shoots as a teenager, some of the clothes were her own charity-shop finds. “I’ve always been into clothes. I used to do jumble sales in Croydon and get bags full of clothes – like bin liners for a fiver.” She sounds wistful. “I can’t do that now.”
With the paparazzi following her every move, a full day’s shopping is near impossible. Moss will call into high-street favourites like Topshop for an hour, or pop into small boutiques. In LA, she’ll cruise around in the car, looking for secondhand shops. “I love going through and finding treasures. I see things other people don’t, sometimes – it’s very random, but I have this . . . radar. I’ll think, ‘Mmm, I fancy wearing a legging’, and then, all of a sudden, on the runways it’s all leggings. And it’s not like we’ve talked. You just know, it’s like a collective consciousness. It’s weird. You can’t explain it at all.”
Clothes have always been Moss’s passion, but her radar works as well on music, art, books and films. It’s something people who work with her often comment on: that she’ll always be the first to play them music or drag them to see a band they’ll come to love, and seems to know about all that’s cool and cutting edge before they do. Although it doesn’t work for everything. “I’m crap with interiors,” she admits cheerfully. “I’ve got a theory that because I lived out of a suitcase for so long, I find it difficult to make decisions about things I can’t pack.”
When it came to her own closets, she got help. In London, she just has a big set of cupboards, stuffed with her countless pairs of jeans. “But in the country, I’ve got a whole room,” she grins. “I was going to do proper cedar-lined closets to moth-proof them, but then it would have been just like a corridor, because it’s up in an attic. So my friend did it and now it’s like a shop. It’s got sofas, a swing chair and screens you can get dressed behind. It’s like a hangout now.”
For the millions of women in Britain who want a piece of Kate, buying into her new collection is the closest most will come to hanging out in that closet with her. “I can’t wait to see people wearing it,” she says, looking like a teenager again.
..................
Bergerac.
.....................
Peter has claimed that he likes to try on Kate's clothes - how does that work ,big lad - wee tiny lass,her knickers must be like the Tardis.I'm sure he would be more comfortable in something from the Beth Ditto leisure range.
.............................
del.interoute.com/?id=edf924b4-fb38-4624-9a62-2ad5cd6f3896&delivery=stream
.........................
From The Sunday Times
April 1, 2007
What Kate did next
She’s the supermodel who became an icon — but now she’s selling more than just her image. As she launches her first collection for Topshop, Kate Moss talks exclusively to Sheryl Garratt about fashion, fame and why absolutely everyone wants a piece of her
Sheryl Garratt
Click on the related link below to view an audio slideshow of Kate Moss modelling the latest Topshop fashions
Lying on a sofa wearing her trademark fitted jeans, a fine grey V-neck sweater and just one sock, Kate Moss is demonstrating why one of her nicknames has long been Calamity Kate. The night before we met, a picture she had leaning against the wall at home had fallen down, she had trodden on it and gashed her sole open.
Like most things in Kate’s life, this incident would be reflected in the distorting mirror of the tabloids a day later, with pictures of her being carried to the car by her boyfriend, Pete Doherty, and speculation about an injured leg. Right now, though, it’s just a daft domestic accident that is stopping her walking. And it hurts.
“Honestly, I was crying this morning, I was in so much pain,” she says in a slightly husky voice that still shows its Croydon origins. “And I’m not a wuss at all.” She wiggles the foot by my face for inspection: it is horribly swollen, in ghastly shades of red, purple and yellow. Lila, her four-year-old daughter with publisher Jefferson Hack, had it about right: “Every time she sees it, she’s like, ‘Oh, that’s disgusting, Mummy.’”
Related Internet Links
* Style's fashion editor Sara Hassan gives her verdict on the clothes in a special multimedia slideshow
Nonetheless, Moss plans to get up at 5am tomorrow to catch a plane – three planes, in fact, with a four-hour stopover en route – to work in St Barts. “It’s a jewellery shoot,” she says, when I suggest that a long flight followed by a photoshoot may not be the best way to heal a swollen foot. “It’s not like I’ll have to run about or anything.” Besides, it’s the Caribbean and one of her mates is coming with her.
She makes it sound like a holiday. It’s only when I talk to her agency that I discover she’s doing two separate shoots and will be working solidly on the trip.
From the acres of newsprint dedicated to her, you’d think that Moss made her living from the sort of hedonistic activities that send tabloid headline writers wild. You rarely read about the Kate who has to be near-dead to cancel a shoot. The Kate who doesn’t just allow photographers and stylists to experiment, but will often push them further. The Kate who sat for a Lucian Freud portrait from 7pm to 2am at least three nights a week for eight months, and only once was 10 minutes late – the day she found out she was pregnant with Lila. Moss’s rep in the fashion business is as someone who works hard. I’ve known her professionally since 1989, when she started modelling for The Face, the magazine I then edited, and, unusually for someone at the top of her game, there has never been a whiff of diva-like behaviour from one of her shoots.
None of this is to suggest that Moss is perfect, of course. She would be the first to say as much. Even in her first shoots, with the photographer Corinne Day, she remembers moaning, “I don’t want to take my clothes off, it’s raining.” But she did, just as she once sat for hours near-naked on a horse on Bodmin Moor in the middle of winter for the photographer Juergen Teller, or spent a whole day swaying on a swing suspended from the studio ceiling for Nick Knight. (If this sounds easy, try pumping a swing for an hour and see how your stomach muscles feel. Then imagine doing it for nine more. Smiling.)
When I ask what makes her so driven, she says that maybe it was those early years, when she was struggling to establish herself. “I had to work hard to get out of Croydon. It wasn’t easy. I didn’t have it on a plate. When I could have been with my friends, just bunking off, I had to get on the Tube all over London, doing my eight castings a day, for four years. But I knew I had to work my arse off to do something with my life.”
Even after her big break as the face of Calvin Klein in 1992, Moss continued to do jobs back-to-back for weeks on end. Now, she no longer does the catwalk shows, and since Lila started school, she rarely travels in term time, reducing the amount of editorial work she does. “I like to put her to bed – that’s my thing.”
But when she does work, she does it properly. She tells me about a shoot the week before near her house in the country, which is clearly where she’s happiest. “I thought it would be so nice, that I could stay at home and not have to come to London, where it’s such a nightmare. But it was raining and freezing, there was a wind machine, smoke machines and I was on a trampoline in the middle of a field in a pair of knickers while everyone else had parkas, hats and gloves on. And I was like, ‘Oh, I can’t do this any more. I’m getting too old.’” She laughs, exposing those famously crooked teeth. “But I did do it, and we got the picture.”
Many models, when you meet them in person, resemble exotic giraffes: all long legs and angular features that look fabulous on camera, but slightly alien in real life. Moss looks just the same as her pictures, only with less make-up and a Marlboro Light in her hand. She is currently the face and body of, among others, Burberry, Versace, Agent Provocateur, Rimmel and Longchamp. The gamine 15-year-old of the early days may have grown into a self-assured 33-year-old, but Moss has never lost that mischievous air and remains at the centre of all that is cool in pop culture, equally at home watching a band in a grungy pub as in the front row at the shows. She is someone who has always appeared supremely comfortable in her own skin, sexy without being self-obsessed or intimidating and still, despite her fame, somehow accessible. She’s the Croydon girl made good, our Kate. Even when she’s at her most glamorous, you sense that she’d be a laugh, someone you might want as a mate. That she’s real.
And yet, there’s no ignoring the extraordinary mythology that surrounds her. It’s not just that her face peers out from magazines and billboards and is one of the most recognised in the world. It’s that her every move is the subject of scrutiny and speculation. What’s it like being this mythologised? “I’m so normal, really,” she says. “They portray me as all these crazy things, and I’m so not like that. I don’t have entourages, I’m as normal as you can get ...” She pauses, perhaps realising that flying to the Caribbean for work and being followed everywhere by a herd of paparazzi is nowhere near normal for most of us. “In this kind of lifestyle, I suppose. I try to be. I like to muck in, I don’t like to sit around. And if I can do something myself, I’ll do it.”
I ask how it feels to see yourself every time you open a magazine. She says she doesn’t even look any more. “It’s like a joke now. Yesterday, in the pub, we were going through a Sunday magazine and playing a game of, ‘Ooh, that’s me! And that’s me again!’ Because Pete will go, ‘Is that you?’ about any model in a magazine. And I’m like, ‘No, she’s Chinese.’ ‘Is that you?’ ‘No. She’s 12.’ It’s quite funny.” She hates being singled out for special treatment, giving as an example people who introduce everyone else present by their first names, but her as “Kate Moss,” just in case someone hasn’t noticed. She dislikes the word celebrity – “It gives me the fear,” she says with a shudder. “It’s horrible” – and though her image may be public property, she decided long ago that her personal life is not. Even when she was dragged through the tabloids, she kept her counsel where many would have been tempted to speak out.
But then, Moss never stopped doing interviews in order to cultivate some sphinx-like air of mystery, as is sometimes assumed. She stopped because she talks too much, she trusts too much, and makes jokes accompanied by deliciously dirty laughs that don’t translate well into print. Most of all, she simply doesn’t want to share her life with strangers. “Why would I want to talk about my private life?” she says, aghast. “No, not my cup of tea at all. I never, ever wanted to do that.”
So if she is talking now, it is because she has something specific to talk about. She has poured a lot of herself into the Kate Moss range that is about to be launched at Topshop. When I went to see the clothes – which are gorgeous, by the way, and so “Kate” that when I was looking at the samples on the rail, I half-expected her to pop out from behind it – the PR expressed surprise at how involved she has been, always in and out of the offices and refusing to even use a fitting model for the clothes, preferring to try them all herself. But Moss wouldn’t have been happy putting her name to any piece of clothing that didn’t feel hers. “I wanted to feel that I’d wear it,” she says, “that I liked it and wanted it.”
For me, the only surprise is that Moss didn’t do it years ago. “I’d talked about it with other people before, and it just hadn’t happened. But this just felt like the right time, with the right people. Before, I didn’t feel I could have given it my full attention. I was travelling so much. Now I’m a lot more grounded and settled, with Lila and everything. I’m here most of the time. And I’m really getting into it. I love it! Philip Green [the Topshop owner] has even said I can have an office. My own office! I want somewhere I can put my mood boards up.”
Only a girl who has lived out of suitcases for most of her adult life could be this excited about having an office to go to, but launching a clothing range is the logical next step for someone whose personal style is imitated all over the world. If Moss wears skinny jeans, then skinny jeans are what every girl wants. She’s done the same for pirate boots, denim hot pants, even festival wellies. When Green suggested that they do something together, she surprised him by saying yes immediately.
She’ll never be a fully-fledged designer, she says. “I can’t sketch. And I can’t make clothes.” But she knows how clothes should feel when she puts them on, she knows how they should fit, and from her first formal meeting with Green, she was clear what she could bring to the store. “I think they kind of copy me sometimes,” she says with modest understatement. “I mean, I’m sure they do it to a lot of people, but I do notice with me, they do it so quickly, and they do it so well. So I said, ‘I could give you my stamp, and you could get it direct.’”
The Kate Moss line will be a year-round collection that will change with the seasons, but have new pieces added all the time. There are fantastic evening dresses that will come in limited editions of 100 or 200, vintage-style day dresses in pretty prints, a jacket made of butter-soft leather (“I know, it’s gorge, isn’t it?”), rock-chick T-shirts, and lots of variations on the waistcoat that Moss more or less single-handedly put back on the fashion agenda. There are jeans, too, of course, branded with little embroidered swallows, hearts and stars – copies of her real tattoos – and a little swallow tag on the belt loop that can also be used as a bracelet. “I wore the jeans this weekend, and they’re quite good,” she says. “I don’t think we’ve got the fit quite perfect yet. But I can keep changing them. The whole range is going to get better and better.”
She brought in her friend, the stylist Katy England, to be a sounding board – and to make it more fun. “That’s what we do anyway, really. ‘What are we going to wear to Glastonbury? What are we going to wear to this party? Ooh, let’s get outfits together!’ Because it was my first time, I just went through my closet, basically. I was just like, ‘I’d love this, but altered like this’, or ‘I’d love that, but in a pinstripe.’ Like I put a waistcoat on with a bias-cut skirt and it looked good so we turned that into a dress.
“But it was a bit eclectic – just pieces I’d worn that I would love for spring/summer. The next one will be more like a story, a collection. I’m really excited about going out and finding things – not just taking stuff from my closet as it is now, but what my dream closet would be.”
Moss has had input into everything, from the design of the instore mini-boutiques, where the range will be displayed, to the ad campaign, which will feature Irina, a former girlfriend of Pete’s, who has since become Moss’s friend, too. “They haven’t said no to anything I wanted to do,” she enthuses. “I’ve said, ‘This isn’t good enough’, ‘This fabric doesn’t feel right, it’s too stiff’, or ‘This leather’s too shiny, it needs to be more matt’, and they’ve done it.”
But over the years, we’ve all come to trust Moss’s taste. Even in her early Face shoots as a teenager, some of the clothes were her own charity-shop finds. “I’ve always been into clothes. I used to do jumble sales in Croydon and get bags full of clothes – like bin liners for a fiver.” She sounds wistful. “I can’t do that now.”
With the paparazzi following her every move, a full day’s shopping is near impossible. Moss will call into high-street favourites like Topshop for an hour, or pop into small boutiques. In LA, she’ll cruise around in the car, looking for secondhand shops. “I love going through and finding treasures. I see things other people don’t, sometimes – it’s very random, but I have this . . . radar. I’ll think, ‘Mmm, I fancy wearing a legging’, and then, all of a sudden, on the runways it’s all leggings. And it’s not like we’ve talked. You just know, it’s like a collective consciousness. It’s weird. You can’t explain it at all.”
Clothes have always been Moss’s passion, but her radar works as well on music, art, books and films. It’s something people who work with her often comment on: that she’ll always be the first to play them music or drag them to see a band they’ll come to love, and seems to know about all that’s cool and cutting edge before they do. Although it doesn’t work for everything. “I’m crap with interiors,” she admits cheerfully. “I’ve got a theory that because I lived out of a suitcase for so long, I find it difficult to make decisions about things I can’t pack.”
When it came to her own closets, she got help. In London, she just has a big set of cupboards, stuffed with her countless pairs of jeans. “But in the country, I’ve got a whole room,” she grins. “I was going to do proper cedar-lined closets to moth-proof them, but then it would have been just like a corridor, because it’s up in an attic. So my friend did it and now it’s like a shop. It’s got sofas, a swing chair and screens you can get dressed behind. It’s like a hangout now.”
For the millions of women in Britain who want a piece of Kate, buying into her new collection is the closest most will come to hanging out in that closet with her. “I can’t wait to see people wearing it,” she says, looking like a teenager again.
..................
Bergerac.