Kate Moss a miracle of science

A year ago, I was having lunch with the editor of Vogue, Alexandra Shulman.

The Daily Mirror pictures of Kate Moss snorting cocaine through a £5 note had been running and the overwhelming view was the world's most famous model was ruined.

Even the impeccably modern Salon internet magazine rushed out: "The skeletal model's coke-fuelled plunge from grace has exposed ugly truths about the fashion industry."

The day I saw Shulman, fashion retailers H&M had announced: "H&M has decided that a campaign with Kate Moss is inconsistent with H&M's clear dissociation of drugs."

Stella McCartney had gone cold. Chanel had released a statement that it would not be renewing her contract. Burberry bowed out.

"So," I said to Shulman, : "How will you manage without Kate Moss? Who will you put on the cover of Vogue?"

Shulman dragged her feet. Firstly, she liked Moss and there was an issue of loyalty (not widely shared). Secondly, there was not another model like her. Moss was uniquely mesmerising.

Over the past few months, this theory has been tested to destruction. Moss has 14 new contracts - more than any other celebrity.

They include Burberry, Calvin Klein, Roberto Cavalli, Louis Vuitton, Versace, Rimmel, Agent Provocateur, Nikon cameras and Virgin mobiles. Last week she was signed up as designer to the British retailer Topshop. When Agent Provocateur released a short internet film about her, the site crashed due to massive over-use.

A year ago, Kate Moss was expected to vanish to a nunnery, or at least The Priory. At 31 she was old for a model, and her £4.7 million ($13.5 million) a year career was to end in disgrace.

Today, the question is whether she is over-exposed and how she can sustain her earnings for 2006, reportedly £30 million.

There is a rule of publicity, once correctly espoused by the actress Kristin Scott Thomas. She said that no one could be stratospherically famous for more than two years. After then the public grows bored and someone new takes your place.

Kate Moss has defied this rule. Look at October Vogue. On the first page, there is Moss, modelling for Dior. A few pages on, she is showing off Louis Vuitton. Flick on, and she's topless in Calvin Klein jeans. Then she's in Burberry. Why, there she is for Versace.

Amazingly, while she is on every billboard, you never tire of her face, whereas other models bore you.

Fashion commentators never fail to point out, Kate Moss does not conform to the criteria of models. She is too short - 5ft 8in (1.73m). She has a lazy eye, dirty hair and wonky teeth. She does not understand the constraints of being a model, particularly in the final stretch: early nights, microbiotic diets, bottles of water.

Moss is not only beautiful, she is a miracle of science. She treats her body with reckless indifference and it doesn't show. Even the Mirror, which had the cocaine story, admitted "she always managed to look like Snow White in the morning".

Last week, Moss was on the front page of The Independent, blacked up, to advertise the American-based "compassionate capitalism" Red campaign. It was controversial - is it bad taste to "black up" a white Western model to draw attention to Africa? - yet Moss was unscathed.

The other heated topic of the week - skinny models - also had Moss at the eye of the storm.

Her look, especially recently, of little shorts and boots depends on legs apparently afflicted by rickets.

Some models end up defending their shapes. Kate Moss, quite brilliantly, says nothing.

Models were healthy-looking until skinny Kate came along. Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer represented the Amazonian, big-hair look of the 1980s.

In a rare interview with the website Showstudio, Moss talked about body image: "How many times can you say, 'I'm not anorexic'?"

As it has turned out, commerce has needed Kate Moss more than she needed it. The ruthless fashion world did not hesitate to distance itself from her when she looked like some junkie knocking on a friend's door.

Make no mistake, Moss was not saved by kindness or pity but by retail necessity. As Alexandra Shulman had presciently noted, there was nobody to take her place.

- INDEPENDENT