Since being scouted at a New York airport at the age of 14, Kate Moss has enjoyed an illustrious modelling career. Yet despite her success, the fashion star from Croydon, south London, harbours to this day the emotional scars of being forced to pose naked in a cover shoot for The Face magazine, which was taken by the late photographer Corinne Day in 1990. “I still, even after that shoot, I did cry a lot about taking my clothes off with her [Day],” Moss, 50, says.
“I really didn’t want to do it.” She explains: “At the time, it was me, Corinne, Drew Jarett, the hairdresser, and Dick Page, the make-up artist. So I would make Drew turn around because he was straight and I was, like, “I’m not having him look at me”.
I was really shy. “I was 15 and topless in a magazine, and I was still in school. Luckily, The Face wasn’t sold in Croydon, so I don’t think anyone really saw it, but they heard about it.
” Moss appears naked in the photograph, protecting her modesty with her hands and a sun hat. In another, she is pictured topless wearing a feathered headdress. “At a very young age, I started doing pictures topless and I was very conscious that I have a mole on my right t** and I hated it so much I would cry,” she says on her friend Bella Freud’s podcast, Fashion Neurosis.
“I never wanted to be topless. I would cry and I had to get over it because the photographer [Day] would be, like, “If you don’t do this, I’m not going to book you for the next.
