Human Hoover, Kate Moss

Am I the only person in London OBSESSED with the Kate Moss press coverage? For an entire week now, the newspapers have been covering the unfolding 'scandal' on every front page.

I'd love to see a documentary about the making of this story, because I think it has been brewing for weeks. About two weeks ago I read an article in the Metro, the free tube paper, which was glowing in its deference to Moss' diabolic ability to party until daylight and then show up at a function the next day looking like a milliion dollars. Did that article invite readers to send in (read: sell) photographs of coked-up Kate? Or was it merely designed to lay a foundation for what was to follow. Regardless, within the space of a week the story is turned right around. Front page photographs showed Kate snorting a line that could stretch from London to Bristol. The accompanying text describes her Herculean effort of five lines in the space of forty minutes, flying in the face of her own description of one-time 'occasional dabbling'. From the five-pound note in her hand (and up her nose) I think it fair to assume that Kate was oblivious to the camera-snapping, otherwise she surely would have reached for a larger denomination. But things just seem to get worse and worse for Kate. When the story breaks, the newspapers score a second goal as Kate has a public breakdown telling a horde of photographers and journalists, "Fuck off, I don’t want to know. Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off!" Has media-savvy Kate secretly retained the services of Tom Cruise's PR people?

I actually didn't see the photos when first published. Walking home on Aldwych last week, I caught the Evening Standard's headline, KATE MOSS COCAINE SHAME. I wondered if that meant she was caught totally sober at a fashion parade. After all, does anyone really expect anything different from an industry where cocaine is consumed like Splenda? Days later, I got the full story. The newsprint is salacious, the photos grainy, and the facts attributed to anonymous friends. The tabloids here are very cruel, and even if she is the mega-bitch portrayed by scurrilous local gossip, one wonders if she deserves being singled out for behavior that otherwise goes unchecked in swinging new-millennium London. The only difference between Kate Moss and the habitual City users is that she isn't control of pension funds, criminal appeals, or a human life. And yet, it seems to be so very important to the newspapers to out her. The cynic in me wonders how much this 'scandal' has more to do with the bumper-to-bumper Fashion Weeks in New York and London this past fortnight.

Still, I've seen some classic headlines:
MODEL SNORTS LINE TO WAKE UP
COCAINE KATE'S £200 A DAY HABIT
END OF THE LINE FOR KATE AND PETE

It'll be interesting to watch the upcoming fall-out from the case. The Metropolitan police chief Sir Ian Blair has vowed a police investigation. She has lost the Chanel and Burberrys contracts, Dior is in doubt, and even H&M (similar to Jeans West) has dropped her, claiming her behaviour could influence the young girls targeted with their Kate Moss campaign. H&M's high moral ground response is the funniest, as they don't have a problem manufacturing clothes in Thai sweatshops.

Despite the mass media coverage, my stodgy English co-workers could care less. Maybe a lifetime of English tabloid exposure can desensitize you. I, on the other hand, can't get enough of the celeb-obsessed salacious kick that comes from reading about someone who snorts their human body weight in cocaine, the value of my weekly rent, every single day.