Interview: Kate Moss

Kate Moss isn't one for staying still. Just when you think you've got her in the frame – poised, posed, ready for the click – she moves and there's a sudden, dramatic shift, shattering your illusion and moving you into a new dimension. This, of course, is the quantum physics of fashion, a science that Moss has been successfully practising for the past 23 years. Bold in Balenciaga, angelic in Alexander McQueen, while the camera doesn't move, Moss does, forever changing, morphing, surprising, shocking.

Newly married, Moss is wearing contentment like a Christian Lacroix coat (along with a spritz of her perfume, Lila Belle). She's loved-up and happy and, if the rumours are to be believed, ready to become a mum again. Controversy has been replaced with conventionality, with revelations that Moss likes to stay at home (she has a townhouse in London and a country retreat a few hours outside the city) and make jam. On the work front, there's a new twist, too. After a decade of promoting Rimmel, Moss is due to launch her own make-up range for the cosmetics company this month. "The packaging is black and just really cool and matt," she says. "I wanted to keep it simple; nothing too bling."

Her excitement is palpable. Or maybe it's wonderment? That at 37 she gets to marry her own rock god, play dress-ups with designers, and dip into the paintbox to create her own lipstick. "I wanted colours that are classic. Beiges and pinks for day, and red – my favourite shade – for the night," reveals Moss, whose inspiration comes from her own make-up bag (which, she tells us, is never without a kohl eyeliner or mascara). Her enthusiasm is contagious and it's part of her appeal.

"Besides being physically beautiful and an incredibly charismatic and extraordinary personality, Kate is just very, very rare, if not totally unique," designer Marc Jacobs has said. "She just fills space with such life, and the energy really comes through in anything, and everything, she does."

Spend time with Moss and it's obvious that she genuinely loves what she does. Boredom isn't in her remit. "I like doing what I do," she admits. "It's not, 'Oh, God, not that again!' I get into it."

Kate Moss & Rimmel Celebrate 10 Year Partnership

Moss has got up to a lot over the years. But perhaps no project has made her as happy as her nuptials to The Kills's guitarist Jamie Hince in July. "I wanted it to be kind of dreamy and 1920s," says Kate, referencing one of her favourite eras (she owns the flapper dress that belonged to Lili Damita, the French actress and first wife of Errol Flynn). The wedding theme – "rock 'n' roll Great Gatsby" – was classic Moss, mixing it up, having fun. Post-ceremony, the bride, stunning, of course, in a cream, bias-cut John Galliano dress, led a three-day party at her country home, where an eclectic tribe of guests (Dame Vivienne Westwood, Jude Law, et al) dined on strawberry granita dusted with gold leaf, and downed Kate 76 cocktails (vodka, champagne, crushed ice and sugar).

Wife, mother, model, businesswoman (last year saw the start of a new collaboration with Longchamp to design handbags and her final collection for British High Street giant Topshop), Moss has managed it all. The irony is, though, that she has not evolved. She doesn't reinvent, reorganise, reassemble – she just is. It's how she lives and how she dresses. She spins on her own axis while the rest of us try to catch up with her. "It's very random, but I have this...radar," she explains. "I'll think, 'Mmm, I fancy wearing a legging,' and then, all of a sudden, on the runways it's all leggings." By then of course, dammit, Moss is working low-waisted skinny jeans and ballet flats.

Moss didn't just throw away the style rule book, she ripped out the pages. Her look is absent-minded, erratic, electrifying. "Kate is the girl who got the whole world dressing this way," says designer Michael Kors, referring to that Moss magic of pairing a parka with a petticoat, or letting a laddered jumper do the job of a dress. "Kate is about looking great on her way to the supermarket while at the same time looking as if she didn't give whatever she is wearing any thought. And that is the secret to great style. Spontaneous chic is what every woman, regardless of age, is shooting for these days." Or, as Moss says: "I shove it on. It's about chaos, not pre-planning." Which could be the mantra for her whole life.

It all started, of course, when Moss was spotted by Storm model agency boss Sarah Doukas at New York's JFK Airport when she was 14, in 1988. Sure, it was an easy start, but that's not to underplay the graft Moss has put in to succeed. "It wasn't easy," she recalls. "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."

For Katherine Ann Moss – or "Katie Mosschops", as was her nickname in her home town of Croydon, London – being discovered a year after her parents' divorce was a testing time, colliding as it did with a surge of teen rebellion. "When I was a kid I was so shy. I didn't say anything until I was, like, 13 and started kicking doors down and yelling, 'I'm going out.'" And then there she was, two years later, getting drunk on whiskey backstage at a John Galliano show in Paris (photographer Mario Testino comforted a weeping Moss, distraught that she'd only been given one costume change, with the sage words, "You are a perfume; you will go on and on").

The modelling world was a baptism of fire for Moss, whose androgynous frame delighted and disgusted, depending on which camp you were in. The bare-breasted Calvin Klein ads; those prepubescent-looking shots the late photographer Corinne Day took for British style bible The Face; the accusations of promoting "heroin chic". The fashionistas were spellbound, the feminists appalled. Meanwhile, Moss just got on with the job of shifting clothes. At 19, she became one of the youngest models to grace the cover of Vogue. Her earnings hit £10,000 a day.

"It was just my time," says Moss, about the early furore. "It was a swing from buxom girls like Cindy Crawford, and people were shocked to see what they called a 'waif'. What can you say? How many times can you say, 'I'm not anorexic'?"

In the end, Moss stopped trying to justify her existence and did what any beautiful girl in her shoes would do: in 1994 she went to LA and started dating Johnny Depp. To listen to the Tinseltown tales of that time is to understand the giddy excitement Moss felt inhabiting that rarefied circle. She hung out with Brad Pitt, pressed flesh with Bob Dylan, and was snogged by Frank Sinatra ("It was his 80th birthday party. He kissed me on the lips. And then he gave me a filterless cigarette"). For her 21st birthday, Depp threw her a surprise party at his club, The Viper Room. "They opened the curtains and there was my mum, my dad, and everyone had flown in from London and New York, and John [Galliano] had come from Paris. It was amazing. I was, like, shaking." (When Depp and Moss later went out for dinner, he spontaneously customised her floor-length red satin dress by slashing it up to the knee with a pair of scissors.)

Three years later and still just 24, Moss checked into the Priory clinic, ostensibly to recover from her partying lifestyle, but later admitted she'd never walked down a catwalk sober. "That's what you do. You kind of just have champagne. You always have champagne before the shows. Always. Even at 10 in the morning."

Kate Moss Gets Married In John Galliano

By now she and Depp were over – he went off with Vanessa Paradis in 1998 – and Moss soon moved on to magazine editor Jefferson Hack (his infamous chat-up line, when he interviewed her for his magazine, Dazed & Confused, was: "You smell of pee"), with whom she had daughter Lila Grace, now nine ("I had simply the best birth. I had candles...a bottle of Cristal champagne"). There was no hint of settling down from Moss, though, now sporting a much-copied pixie crop and partying with new best friends Sadie Frost and Jude Law.

Hack's attempts to get Moss down the aisle reputedly sealed the couple's demise (they have remained on good terms, however, with Hack attending Moss's wedding), and then at her 31st birthday party Moss hooked up with junkie musician Pete Doherty. More of a stumble than a stride (still, pre-Doherty, there was apparently Daniel Craig and Russell Brand, and possibly Courtney Love), Moss rolled with the chaos and there was something about her happy, unapologetic attitude that endeared her.

Amid her Doherty phase, in 2005, Moss, as we all know, picked up a new moniker, "Cocaine Kate", after grainy shots of her apparently snorting the drug were published in a British newspaper. Suffice to say, the requisite apology followed and the "necessary steps" Moss said she needed to take to address "various personal issues" led her to Meadows Clinic, a treatment facility in Arizona in the US. Much was made of Moss's comeback afterwards but, in reality, she never went away. Sure, a few companies got cold feet for a while – Burberry bailed, along with H&M and Chanel – but they were just waiting for Moss to move on and reframe. ("We love you Kate," read the message emblazoned on the T-shirt of the late Alexander McQueen in 2005, a sentiment supported by many.)

And then there was Moss again, picking up the Model of the Year prize at the British Fashion Awards in 2006; collaborations with Topshop and Longchamp; pipping Lady Gaga to US Vogue's "best dressed woman of the decade" award. Her transgressions, then, are a part of who she is (there was another flash of her rebellious streak last March when, back on the catwalk, she lit up a cigarette during Paris Fashion Week, on No Smoking Day, of all days). That Moss is still relevant is because of, not despite, her misdemeanours. Like the wonky teeth she's refused to fix (she once did a Calvin Klein show with one missing tooth, such was her fear of dentists), Moss gives us her flaws.

As a fashion icon, that authenticity has served her well. "I never 'dress up'," she states. "I wear things I like and that is my style. That might seem very simple, or even simplistic, but it's the complete truth. This harmony between my inner self and my look is perhaps what appeals to so many people."

Who knows what's next for Moss? She talks of her interest in a jewellery range (she collects vintage earrings) and says one day she'd like to design for children ("That's what my daughter wants me to do"). For now, with a new husband, modelling work and the Rimmel project, working mum Moss says, "I'm trying to do it all." There is no great game plan (this is Moss, after all). "I'm just going along with the flow, really. I'm kind of mixing it up." And then she adds that final, killer caveat: "I don't want to get bored." You see, Kate Moss really isn't one for staying still.