Kate's New Obsession

Kate Moss, Mario Sorrenti and Raf Simons recall one of beauty’s most iconic campaigns — and celebrate the launch of Calvin Klein’s latest scent.

- Marshall Heyman

SINCE BEING DISCOVERED at New York’s JFK airport at 14, Kate Moss has been a muse to many, from Lucian Freud, Chuck Close and Banksy to Edina and Patsy on Absolutely Fabulous. Let’s just say that like Helen of Troy with her ships, hers is the face that launched countless careers, exhibitions, fashion lines and at least one 18-karat-gold, 50-kilogram statue that we know of. (It’s called Siren, and it’s by the British artist Marc Quinn.)

The photographs accompanying this article were taken by yet another creative inspired by the 43-year old British beauty. That would be her current boyfriend, the 30-year-old socialite and photographer Count Nikolai von Bismarck.

The most famous collaboration Moss has had with a photographer also happened to begin off set. It was the campaign that catapulted her to international superstardom — the 1993 Calvin Klein Obsession shoot she did with then boyfriend Mario Sorrenti. “I think Calvin was really clever,” Moss says now. “He knew there was going to be something.”

Sorrenti’s iconic photograph of Moss is so ingrained in the fashion industry’s collective memory, it barely needs description. The 18-year-old Moss lies naked on a black couch. She looks up at us, but really at the camera and the man behind it: Sorrenti, her dashing paramour. How did it come to be?

Fabien Baron, then the creative director of US Harper’s BAZAAR, had arranged to introduce the 20-year-old Sorrenti to Klein. Sorrenti brought his photo diaries of Moss when he went to see the fashion designer, and “Calvin just flipped,” Sorrenti recalls. “He said, ‘Whatever you need, we’ll organise it for you.’”