Kate Moss admits battle with anxiety

MANILA, Philippines – Designer John Galliano dubbed her “one of the last English roses.”

People around the world regard her as the foremost British fashion icon (testament to which are the various books published on her personal style alone).

She is the only petite girl in the world of supermodels (she stands 5’6″ in an industry where the average female height is 5’8″).

Kate Moss is known for all these and more.

What most people don’t know is that, as a young girl entering the world of modeling, she suffered from anxiety brought about by a Calvin Klein campaign shoot.

The year was 1992. Kate Moss was 18 years old. Mark Wahlberg was 21 years old and known as rapper Marky Mark, younger brother of New Kids on the Block’s Donnie Wahlberg.

Marky Mark was featured in a campaign for Calvin Klein underwear, and Moss was his muse. Their interaction and poses were meant to add the sexy factor in the trademark minimalist style Calvin Klein campaigns are known for.

Looking at the photos and videos of that campaign that launched her into becoming the most in-demand model of her time, one wouldn’t be able to tell that under the facade, Moss was highly uncomfortable and getting traumatized.

“I had a nervous breakdown when I had to go and work with Marky Mark and Herb Ritts,” she tells James Fox for the Vanity Fair December cover story. “It didn’t feel like me at all. I felt really bad about straddling this buff guy. I didn’t like it.”

Moss says that she “couldn’t get out of bed for two weeks” after the shoot. “I thought I was going to die,” she tells Fox. “I went to the doctor, and he said, ‘I’ll give you some Valium’.”

It was friend Francesca Sorrenti who told Moss not to take Valium. “It was just anxiety. Nobody takes care of you mentally. There’s a massive pressure to do what you have to do,” she continues.

“I was really little, and I was going to work with Steven Meisel. It was just really weird — a stretch limo coming to pick you up from work. I didn’t like it. But it was work, and I had to do it.”

Two years after that traumatizing shoot, Moss found love with actor Johnny Depp, then the young anti-matinee-idol heartthrob known as the star of the TV series 21 Jump Street (1987-1990) and the movie Edward Scissorhands (1990).

Vanity Fair calls the romance “brief but intense.”

“There’s nobody that’s ever really been able to take care of me. Johnny did for a bit,” Moss says. “I believed what he said. Like if I said, ‘What do I do?,’ he’d tell me. And that’s what I missed when I left.”

“I really lost that gauge of somebody I could trust. Nightmare,” Moss recalls.

Now 38 years old, Moss is happily married to Jamie Hince (of the band The Kills) and is a doting mother to 10-year-old Lilia Grace (her daughter with Dazed and Confused movie editor Jefferson Hack).

“I’m actually quite settled,” she tells Fox and Vanity Fair. – Rappler.com