Why Can't I Get Over THAT Photo of Kate Moss by Corinne Day for British Vogue's June 1993 Issue?

Every few months, this photo of Kate Moss pops up online or as a thumbnail photo in a magazine spread, tucked away in a shopping guide or mood board or a think piece about pared down fashion.

The image, shot by the late, contentious photographer Corinne Day, was part of a 1993 Vogue UK spread called “Under-Exposure,” a triple-entendre playing on themes of photography, skivvies, and the irony of being overexposed. The spread, like so much of Day’s work, featured an unlikely subject in an unseemly space. Both Kate Moss and Corinne Day were known as counter-culture, rejecting anything conventional in the way of magazines, fashion, and photography at the time.

Now, somewhat ironically, the photograph graces the walls of the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington, London - about as mainstream as you can get. But before that, it was carefully hung, no doubt, on the walls of thousands of teenage girls in bedrooms the world over.

I myself had a reprint of this image, torn from an early aughts magazine and taped to the wall behind my desk in northern Italy while I was studying abroad in college. I was miserable that semester, far from home and completely broke while my parents were divorcing stateside. As always, even today, I had magazine pages, mostly ads but some editorials, taped and pinned to the walls and shelves around my room. I don’t remember a single one of the other pages on my wall in my tiny bedroom in Italy except for this image - the couple dozen others have all just faded away in my mind - and while I don’t know exactly how, I am certain that this one helped me, in some indeterminate way, during that nearly unbearable time in my life.

Like many of Corinne’s images, this photograph, and Kate, are no-frills. The clothes look almost dingy, as does the room. For me, a student with no money while the rest of my classmates were jetting around Europe visiting Prague or Istanbul on the weekends, it felt attainable, relatable.

Kate’s body, however, was not - she was so viciously thin at that time that she virtually singlehandedly pioneered the entire “heroin chic” aesthetic. But every great Vogue photograph has to have an element of being out of reach to varying degrees, and this one you could just about graze with your fingertips, save for Kate’s impossible-to-achieve physique.

Looking at the picture through the lens of a woman with an Instagram account in 2022, where everything is retouched beyond recognition and faces and bodies are so surgically and digitally altered that they barely look human anymore, it’s hard to believe this image was featured in a magazine. The underwear doesn’t even fit right. It’s loose and baggy. The top would be a nightmare to wear, and conjures the all-too-familiar but still unwelcome sensation of going to sleep in a tank top and waking up with one boob out. The combo of the two doesn’t even really match or look cool. Kate’s hair isn’t done, it quite literally looks like she woke up and tied her hair back to brush her teeth, just like any of us girls would do. It’s easy to imagine that there wasn’t a hair stylist on set, that it was just Kate and Corinne and a camera - which was probably the point. But there was one, James Brown, a young stylist also from Croyden, like Kate - in fact, the two met while he was working in a hair salon at age 15 and while Kate was still in school.

Corinne Day also met Kate while she was still in school, and was the first to photograph her in any significant, stylized way. It just so happens that Day’s "stylized” way was to look extremely un-stylized, random, haphazard, unclean. Day was alternately a visionary or a bore, depending on who you ask and whether they felt exploited by her or discovered, celebrated. Many appreciated her commitment to violently yanking what was otherwise the elitist world of fashion and magazines so far down to earth that where it landed was more like a seedy underbelly of civilization that would otherwise never be seen in the pages of Vogue.

A few decades into her career, while Kate was a chameleon and had evolved into an icon, Day’s aesthetic, completely unchanged, was tired and overdone. Her subjects were most often her friends, and her circle was getting smaller. And, the “heroin chic” look wasn’t just for the shot - many of her subjects were actually heroin addicts, like her friend Tara St. Hill, who she photographed without consent, high on drugs, having sex on a dirty mattress on the floor. Day and St. Hill’s relationship survived the fallout from when Day published the images in her first ever book Diary, and Day’s aesthetic would resurrect every time the ever-turning wheel of fashion found its way back. And every time it does, Kate Moss, in stretched out lace underwear and a plain old tank top under an arch of Christmas lights taped to the wall, comes right back with it.

Let’s get back to the image at hand - I’ll share it again below:

The pose is pure perfection. The asymmetry of the strand of lights, the tackiness of the wires being held up by masking tape. Was that planned? Did a stylist bring a roll of masking tape on purpose, or was it a happy accident where that was the only tape they had lying around and they decided “you know what, let’s keep it.”

The photo above is arguably better. Her hair is more coiffed, pulled back tight like a proper ballerina’s, the bra is more feminine, the tank top is pulled down to resemble a micro-mini skirt. But this one isn’t the one that everyone remembers, that girls hung in their rooms. Nor is the one below, of Kate with (slightly greasy-looking) beach waves and perfect makeup, wrapped in a blanket with a chic lace bra and the top of a slubby looking sock just peeking through.

So…what is it about that photograph? Why has it stood the test of time, still evoking emotion and aspiration in the viewer, all these years - nearly 30! - later?

First of all, despite its dirty-looking ambiance, and even a slightly unwashed-looking Kate Moss, the image, like most in the “Under-Exposed” spread, is really clean. It is completely centered on the model, who is perfectly in focus and staring at the camera, dead-on. Her expression is just a hair above blank; it’s not exactly emotionless, but it could be sad, happy, angry, amused, irritated, or anything in between. The viewer can sort of project whatever they may be feeling onto her face and feel represented, understood.

Moreover, she’s strong and unabashed, with a hand firmly placed on her hip in bored cockiness. So many lingerie shots, certainly back then as Victoria’s Secret was just gearing up for its first fashion show, but even today, are for the male gaze. Models adopt a sort of helpless, over-sexualized expression and pose, oftentimes crawling, leaning over suggestively, splayed out to showcase an improbably lean set of abs beneath an improbably ample set of ta-tas. Day’s portrait of Kate looks like just a girl, in her room, probably annoyed at something her boyfriend did, wearing whatever she grabbed first from inside the drawer. There’s no agenda - seduction, boosting one’s own self-confidence, pleasing a man, conforming to society’s expectation. This is just about comfort and function, and the model would really like to just move on so can you just take the picture already?

The stark decor, too, is attainable by nearly all. The props are a blanket, a radiator, a string of lights. We’re so used to beauty as something so highly stylized, or else so starkly simple in a way that is untouchably perfect and out of reach. But any of us girls (and guys) could just take a string of lights and tape them up, and boom! Our room looks like the pages of Vogue. How often did, and does, that happen?

I think what this photo achieves, and what so few after it have managed to achieve, is getting the viewer to stop dead in their tracks and look at something so quotidien yet still so gorgeous that it feels equal parts unreal and commonplace.

So, again- what is it about this photo? Is it that Kate Moss is beautiful? Thin? There are so many models, actors, and random social media personalities equally or more so.

What makes Kate Moss stand out, and what makes this image stand out, is that here is a woman so gifted, genetically, who just could not care less. The photographer and stylist and hair and makeup artists also seem like they don’t care, like they aren’t paying Vogue the respect that it’s due, and to all the outsiders that want in, it’s almost like an in-joke, a little wink amongst ourselves, that what Vogue thinks it is gatekeeping has really been inside all of our little bedrooms, our little worlds, all along.

WRITER’S NOTE: I was inspired to write this piece after reading Champagne Supernovas: Kate Moss, Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen, and the '90s Renegades Who Remade Fashion by Maureen Callahan. (Linked via Indie Bookshop, you could of course buy it on Amazon.) She talks at great length about the relationship between Kate Moss and Corinne Day, and of course when “Under-Exposed” was mentioned I was immediately transported to the days when this photo was taped the my wall so I had to do a deep dive. The entire book was amazing and illuminated, I highly recommend it!