POP CULTURE: Cocaine Kate

Let the supermodels have their drugs

Josh Bell

The tabloid obsession of the last month has been supermodel Kate Moss, who was caught red-handed (or white-nosed) by Britain's Daily Mirror snorting cocaine in a recording studio. Since the incriminating Mirror pictures appeared last month, Moss has been dropped from several modeling contracts, vilified in all sorts of press outlets and entered rehab. Her sometime boyfriend, former Libertines singer and known crack addict Pete Doherty, was arrested earlier this week, and Moss herself is under investigation by British police. It has not been a good couple of weeks to be Kate Moss.


Celebrities with drug problems are nothing new, and rail-thin supermodels with coke habits are clichés at this point. So why do we care so much about Moss and her drug problems? More importantly, why do companies like H&M, Chanel and Burberry care what Moss does in her free time, as long as she makes it to work? It's not as if she's the first model or celebrity with a drug problem, and so far she's been doing a bang-up job of remaining a working junkie, even dressing impeccably when just out for a stroll that will inevitably be snapped by the paparazzi.


Of course, it's bad for Moss to have a drug addiction and kudos to her for going into rehab, even if it took the entire international tabloid cabal to get her there. But the way she's been shunned as a pariah, when people such as Naomi Campbell, who's admitted to cocaine use and has been accused of assaulting her assistants, continue to get work is a ridiculous sort of hypocrisy. The fashion industry has made a killing off of selling the kind of body type Moss represents: an emaciated, corpse-like figure that's impossible to maintain without either starving oneself or ingesting large amounts of illegal substances.


The irony is that Moss' drug problem is killing her career no matter what she does about it. If she remains an unrepentant addict, the companies that can no longer pretend they don't know about her proclivities will shun her, and if she heads into rehab and genuinely kicks her habit, she'll likely come out without the body that made her such a success in the first place. Take a look at the pictures of Courtney Love, looking puffy in her brief stint of sobriety this year, to glimpse Moss' possible future. That's not exactly going to land her on the cover of Vogue.


What, then, is the answer? Aside from widespread changes in the beauty standards espoused by the fashion industry—and good luck accomplishing that one—the only sensible solution is to leave Kate Moss the hell alone. If she wants to snort coke and date a crack-addicted rock star, let her. It's her God-given right as a supermodel. This is a hole that the entire fashion industry, with a celebrity obsessed public in collusion, has dug for itself, and Moss is only playing to expectations. Her drug habit is merely her way of keeping her livelihood.


Granted, Moss has a 3-year-old daughter, and her lifestyle has a good chance of killing her and leaving her daughter an orphan, or at the very least a seriously damaged person. For Kate Moss the human being, getting off drugs is the right thing to do. But for Kate Moss the entity, the commodity pulling in a reported $9 million a year from modeling, getting off drugs is not only the wrong thing to do, it's pointless, because the public will only be interested as long as Moss is either on drugs or trying unsuccessfully to kick them. As soon as her addiction goes away, so does Moss' success. The smartest thing for her to do would be to rack up some more lines, and the smartest thing for the fashion industry would be to go right back to paying her the money she needs to do so.



Josh Bell prefers Kate Winslet over Kate Moss. Read more of his takes on pop culture at
http://signalbleed.blogspot.com.

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