Kate Moss Just Set A Fashion-World Record Thanks To Madonna

Kate Moss was the only supermodel not asked to feature in the most supermodel-heavy music video of all time. Discovered by Sarah Doukas, founder of Storm Model Management, in a queue at JFK Airport just two years earlier, Moss was still on the cusp of global fame when, in 1990, a camera-weary George Michael decided that, rather than appear in the video for “Freedom! ’90” himself, he would hand the spotlight to Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford, inspired by Peter Lindbergh’s now-iconic portrait of the five women on the January 1990 cover of British Vogue. “I just missed it,” Moss told The Telegraph in 2011, when asked about her biggest regrets. “That would have been amazing.”

Oh well. In 2012, Michael finally turned to Moss – who had arguably eclipsed her peers in notoriety – to front the video for his comeback single “White Light”, in which she plays his mother. “Every boy who has lost his mum thinks his mum was the most beautiful woman in the world,” Michael told Magic FM at the time. “Why not ask the most beautiful woman in the world to be that figure?” By then, Moss had become as much a muse to music as she was to fashion, having bridged the two worlds through a series of indie boyfriends and a rock-and-roll reputation to rival theirs. (See: Moss, leaning backwards out of Pete Doherty’s window with a cigarette dangling from her mouth, or tramping through Worthy Farm in a metallic mini dress and mud-splattered Hunters at the 2005 edition of Glastonbury Festival.)

There she was as an exquisite corpse in Johnny Cash’s “Delia’s Gone”; a thuggish femme fatale in Primal Scream’s “Kowalski” in 1997; later singing backing vocals on the band’s cover of “Some Velvet Morning” in 2002, the same year she appeared as one of several Moss clones in Marianne Faithfull’s “Sex With Strangers”; and, most famously, in The White Stripes’ 2003 video for “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself”, pole-dancing for Sofia Coppola. Then along came appearances in Paul McCartney’s 2013 “Queenie Eye”, the posthumous video for Elvis Presley’s “The Wonder of You” and Massive Attack’s “Ritual Spirit”, both released in 2016. And so it should perhaps come as no surprise that, when Torso – the New York-based duo affiliated with pioneering fashion-cum-art collective DIS, and known for their work for likes of Mugler, Nike andl latterly, Charli xcx – was casting for Madonna’s just-released short film, which previews her forthcoming Confessions II album, Moss turned up once again.

During the “Danceteria” sequence – an ode to the New York club that shaped Madonna’s early career – she appears in the reflection of a bathroom mirror, flipping her hair in a biker jacket, while Benedict Cumberbatch, Odessa A’zion, Archie Madekwe, Gwendoline Christie, Arca, Shygirl, Richard E Grant, Honey Dijon, João Pedro and, bizzarely, Cole Palmer, writhe around the sinks, all of them clad in slinky, club-ready Dolce & Gabbana looks. That Sabrina Carpenter and Julia Garner also feature is a reminder of both the 67-year-old musician and the 52-year-old model’s influence.

It also places Moss at the centre of a peculiar piece of pop-cultural trivia. With this latest cameo, she is now tied with Cara Delevingne for the greatest number of music-video appearances by a model, at 14. Delevingne’s tally includes appearances in Taylor Swift’s 2015 “Bad Blood”, Elton John’s 2024 “Step Into Christmas” and – stretching the definition somewhat – the Gal Gadot-organised crime that was the celebrity singalong version of “Imagine” in 2020. The statistic calls to mind one of Moss’s most famous quotes, listed – perhaps apocryphally – on IMDb as: “I would have wanted to be a rock star, a lead singer, if I wasn’t a model. I’d go touring in a bus with my band. In my next life, that’s the plan.” As it turned out, Moss hardly needed to wait for a divine act of reincarnation in order to make any of that happen.