Kate's Moss's last collection for Topshop

Kate Moss's 14th and final Topshop collection is now on sale. Not a bad innings considering the designs were based on her own wardrobe. So what next, asks Jess Cartner-Morley

 

Kate Moss at Topshop on Monday night.Kate Moss is the premier style icon of our times. I say that not as an opinion, but as a statement of fact. At some point in the five years since the appearance of those pictures of her chopping out lines of coke on a CD cover, Kate Moss metamorphosed from being Britain's most famous model and one of the world's most infamous party girls to being the muse of our generation. Through reckless overuse the label "style icon" has been devalued faster than the Vietnamese dong, but in the case of Moss, it holds steady. Kate is beautiful and has excellent taste in clothes, but that wouldn't be enough to give her an edge. Kate's appeal is her point of difference in an era when most famous women have had the life squeezed out of them by the Daily Mail values that rule celebrity culture. Those values rule that to win the nation's love, a female celebrity must live her life by a series of signposted photo opportunities that revolve around marriage and pregnancy, then the all-important back-in-her-jeans-with-Bugaboo post-baby shot, then, depending on how things pan out at home, twee appearances en famille with over-styled kids at Harry Potter premieres or victimy gaunt-in-dark-sunglasses post-scandal shots. Moss does none of this. You can't even imagine her with a pram, although logic dictates she must have had one at some point. Without, obviously, endorsing cocaine benders, it seems to me that there is something rather cheering about the fact that it is a woman who breaks all those rules who has become an object of enduring fascination while others have come and gone. What does all this have to do with the Kate Moss for Topshop collections, the final instalment of which went on sale yesterday? A lot, actually. Jean Cocteau said that style is a simple way of saying complicated things. Moss doesn't speak much, but we read the story through her clothes: the fun, the rock heritage, the decadence of making your fortune and blowing it on fur coats. When Topshop hired Moss as a designer in 2007, eyebrows were raised – since when did being a model make you a designer, we wondered – but from the start, the smart thing about the label was how closely it was based on Moss's own wardrobe. In September 2003 I went to a New York fashion week dinner hosted by Moss's then-boyfriend, Jefferson Hack, at which Moss stole the show in a one-shouldered lemon-yellow vintage cocktail dress. I can recall almost nothing about the evening now – I remember Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin were there, although I certainly can't remember what Gwyneth wore – but I can still picture Kate perfectly. The picture was reprinted endlessly; and then, two years later, an almost perfect replica appeared in the first Kate Moss for Topshop range. Like everyone else, I bought it. It is no coincidence that the "Kate Iconic" pieces – the 10 best-sellers that have been reissued this week to mark the end of Kate Moss for Topshop – are weighted heavily towards pieces such as the flower-print mini dress that are instantly recognisable as first-worn-by-Kate. Early on, when rumours began to emerge from the Topshop design studio that Moss's method of designing was based on turning up at the studio with clothes from her own wardrobe to be adapted, the story went around as if it was a scandal. As it turned out, the close match to what Kate really wore was the range's strength, not its weakness, something Philip Green and the gang knew very well. For the launch of this final collection, the store-in-store was styled as Kate's dressing-room, complete with powder-blue sofa, vintage mirrors and a disco ball. Every novelist knows that the danger of mining your own life for material is that after pouring your life and soul into your first effort, pickings are slimmer for each sequel. A label based on Kate's wardrobe was always going to have a shelf life, and 14 collections is not a bad innings. Moss has an ongoing and more upmarket gig designing handbags for the French brand Longchamp – the current collection has a 70s-glam, Angie Bowie mood, which is very next- season. A collector of vintage earrings, she is apparently in talks to design a range of semi-precious jewellery. She is currently to be found consolidating her position as modern muse on the cover of Bryan Ferry's album Olympia. Ferry's Olympia, like Manet's, wears a necklace and not much else. The portrait makes a sweet bookend pair, to my mind, with the first picture I remember of Kate Moss – also with no clothes on, photographed by Corinne Day for the Face, barefaced and bare-breasted in an Indian feather headdress. When you really make it as a style icon, maybe you don't even need clothes any more.