- Turned up at French Vogue cocktail party in completely sheer bodysuit
- Derided by fashion critics who remarked on 'rough' appearance
- Comes as Cara Delevingne, 20, has exploded onto fashion scene
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Kate Moss walking for Marc Jacobs at the Louis Vuitton show during Pars fashion week
Nothing was said at the time â€" this is, after all the world of fashion, and Kate Moss expects to be sucked up to at every opportunity.
But, at the cocktail party of Carine Roitfeld, former editor of French Vogue, in the Hotel Salomon de Rothschild in Paris on Tuesday night, some were taken aback when Miss Moss turned up in a tiny bodysuit, sprinkled with diamante stones that was completely sheer.
The look bore little relation to the event’s prescribed ‘smokey eye and black tie’ dress code â€" instead it was the sort of look-at-me number you might expect to see on an ageing pop star such as Cher.
And from the back, the famous Moss derriere â€" which rather hung out of the back of her shorts â€" looked deflated, crinkled and every one of its 39 years.
It was not what we’d expect from the fashion icon, who has been working as a model for 25 years. A rare style misstep, or a sign that Moss, desperate to keep up with models half her age, is losing her gloss?
Fashion critics derided her choice of outfit, while online commentators were cruel about the model’s figure, remarking on her ‘short .?.?. pony legs’ and ‘rough’ appearance.
‘Kate Moss is well known for her couldn’t-care-less meets attention-seeking attitude, but this all-over ten-denier style statement spelled nothing but desperation,’ said Aisling O’Connor, the fashion editor of the website Bohomoth.com.
All this comes at a time when 20-year-old Cara Delevingne has exploded onto the fashion scene with her onesie-wearing, face-pulling quirkiness. Cara has everything that Kate used to have, and is clearly getting all of the attention that goes with it. Who could blame Kate if she did feel a tad rattled by a new arrival threatening her crown when she’s not yet ready to surrender it?
The fact is that Miss Delevingne, a private schoolgirl from Chelsea, is very much on the up, having just posed for her first Vogue cover.
And while Cara was mobbed by excitable fashion students and fans outside the fashion shows all week in Paris, Kate glumly and quietly glided from the Le Meurice hotel to her car and on to the shows with much less fuss and attention.
Cara walked in seven shows including Lanvin, Jean Paul Gaultier, Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent and was the undisputed hit of the week â€" indeed, she’s racked up an astonishing 25 shows this year.
Fresh face: Cara Delevingne has exploded onto the fashion scene and just posed for her first Vogue cover
Kate, meanwhile, only walked for her old friend Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton (alongside Cara) where she closed the show.
Indeed, it must surely grate that one of the most high-profile advertising contracts which Kate once fronted â€" posing for Burberry â€" has gone to Cara Delevingne.
On close inspection, Kate Moss appears to be exerting less of a draw over the fashion world. While she remains the UK’s highest earning model by some way, it’s said that her annual earnings have dropped by at least £3?million and continue to spiral downwards. The most recent estimate in June last year by Forbes, the American business magazine, said that she had earned £6.3?million in the previous 12 months, compared with a 2010/11 figure of £8.9?million.
On top of this apparent dip in income Moss has, in recent months, also seen the lucrative contracts she once held go to younger models, including the glamorous Dior Addict campaign she fronted from 2011 to 2012.
Rising Dutch star Daphne Groeneveld â€" who looks like an impossibly fresh Brigitte Bardot â€" now fronts the Dior Addict campaign that rolled out in June last year. Groeneveld is 18.
She was also replaced as the ‘face’ of the Spanish clothing chain Mango in December after a three-year association. Australian supermodel Miranda Kerr, 29, fronted Mango’s most recent campaign instead of her.
Moss’s perfume campaign for YSL’s Parisienne ended in 2011. The scent is now being represented by Marine Vacth, a 22-year-old French actress and model.
Her campaign for the lingerie firm Agent Provocateur has also run its course, with the firm using young British model Alice Dellal, who was then succeeded by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. Now actress Penelope Cruz and her sister Monica front the brand.
On the up: Cara Delevingne starred at Paris Fashion Week
Likewise, her Dior Opium adverts are a distant memory â€" the brand is now represented by English actress Emily Blunt.
Adverts for Calvin Klein jeans, which Kate did in 2005, currently feature Finnish model Suvi Koponen, who is a younger, blonder, leggier Moss doppelganger.
Of course, this is the nature of the fast-moving fashion and beauty industry, as brands seek to associate themselves with the biggest name of the moment.
And that’s not to say that Kate Moss isn’t working any more, and many in the fashion world are very loyal to her. She has a campaign for Givenchy, thanks to her friendship with creative dire ctor Ricardo Tisci, and also another for Versace this year (the fashion house has a decades-long relationship with her).
When approached by the Mail, her agency Storm was quick to point out her five magazine covers so far this year and the fact her £50 coffee table book, of which more later, has been a sell out.
It must be said that the shoots and campaigns she is doing are, quite frankly, bordering on sleazy. Her current campaign for Vivienne Westwood â€" shot by Juergen Teller â€" is a crude photograph of Kate in a short skirt looking as if she is straddling a pole. Yet again, another picture in the same flesh-exposing, attention-seeking league.
She starred in a wearyingly ‘provocative’ cover shoot for the February issue of V magazine, which featured her striking quasi-lesbian poses with the singer Rihanna.
She is even said to be in talks to pose as a cover girl for Playboy’s 60th anniversar y edition. But while her shoots are becoming increasingly gratuitous, Kate’s taste for fast living seems to have waned with age. She has settled into a slightly suburban version of her old London life in a £8.5??million home in Highgate, North London, with her rocker husband Jamie Hince and daughter Lila, 11, whose father is style commentator and publisher Jefferson Hack.
The hedonistic days when she was a leading light of the Primrose Hill posse are a distant memory.
The excesses of her on-and-off romance with heroin addict Pete Doherty are also far behind her.
Now she likes to spend her time walking her Staffordshire terrier Archie and popping to her local pub, The Flask in Highgate.
Perhaps in an attempt to cling on to her career, she has started taking care of herself more. Her new home has a Turkish steam room in the basement and she is a fan of expensive facial treatments.
There have even been reports of her trying Jivamukti Yoga, although Kate, naturally blessed with a slim physique, has never had much patience with exercise.
Meanwhile, perhaps aware that her moment has passed, Kate seems to be trying to reinvent herself as an icon of fashion history.
In November last year, she brought out a coffee table book titled simply Kate Moss â€" a ‘diary in pictures’ of her modelling career. It is a thick tome costing an eye-watering £50. She says nothing about drugs, about her Primrose Hill years, or about Pete Doherty.
To the untutored eye, however, the book looks more soft porn than high fashion and seems another thinly-disguised attempt to hold onto the number one supermodel slot.
She is naked in around half the pictures: naked on a beach, naked on a rug, naked except for a spiked helmet and so on.
Moss told one interviewer that her daughter open ed the book and exclaimed: ‘Oh Mummy!’ in dismay. She says she has promised Lila there will be fewer revealing shots in any subsequent volumes.
What an excruciating conversation to have with an 11-year-old.
But then, as she proved in Paris this week, there are only so many surefire ways to get everybody’s attention.
And even though she is growing older, she hasn’t quite grown out of them just yet.
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