An hour spent in the company of Kate Moss to discuss her debut Zara collection is a little bit like playing dress up with a friend. Except she’s Britain’s foremost supermodel. And we’re in the Four Seasons.
With longtime collaborator Kate Phelan egging her on, we rip through a rail of samples as Moss spills the details on the archive pieces that inspired the edit, while intermittently trying on looks and insisting everyone else does the same. We’re getting ready for a night out, but it’s actually 3pm on a Tuesday and this is an interview, not a party! It all feels deliciously naughty, like a time warp, in which we’re transported back to Glastonbury 2005, thanks to a luxed-up recreation of the gold Lurex festival look that’s engrained in the public psyche, and fed morsels of information about her inner circle (it was Twiggy who encouraged Kate to start truffling away her precious pieces in case she one day had a daughter to wear them, and Katy England who prompted Moss to pitch an archive-inspired capsule to Zara).
“I can’t help dressing up! I’m not very good at sitting down and answering questions,” cries Moss, while simultaneously admiring the stitching on her new Venetian-style leopard-print pumps, snatching a lace bralette – her main uniform during our time spent together – and explaining the importance of the ruching on a peach silk satin skirt, which began life as a whisper of a 1930s dress. “I’m styling up a storm, I should be working in the shop!” she cackles, before clarifying: “I’m not a designer.”
There’s reason to be giddy. The concise line of quintessentially Kate pieces dropping on 30 November (Zara’s big play for party season) is good. Really good. The Mert and Marcus campaign image of Moss smouldering in a crystal bra and Anita Pallenberg-inspired pants, along with an accompanying lookbook featuring the new guard (Ch’lita Collins, Georgia Palmer and Ella Dalton) don’t do justice to the quality of the affordable – I repeat affordable – cheetah-dotted blazers, patent cropped trenches and beaded minidresses curated as “a taster” of Kate’s style. There were rounds and rounds of edits, as Moss and her partner-in-crime England (“she’s the professional one, I got more and more ridiculous”) turned the fruits of a single morning in the fashion plate’s archive into Zara-friendly pieces for the masses. “I couldn’t even really look, it was too overwhelming,” shares Moss, who was shocked her 20th birthday ensemble – a vintage cheongsam and Vivienne Westwood heels – was still nestled in there after all these years.
Said dress was too complex to emulate during a summer spent flitting back and forth to Spain, but if the Inditex monolith hasn’t already booked Moss for a second season, we’d be gobsmacked. It’s not every day a brand receives a comprehensive deck from a super detailing how she’ll make them a small fortune (England’s son Wolf helped the pair create the pdf, which no doubt had execs at Zara HQ high-fiving). “I’ve never, ever pitched a job – my whole life!” shares Kate, adding that nerves are starting to set in around the launch.
Why? She’s worried that everyone is doing a leopard-print flat now. Ditto trenches. To someone whose entire ethos is the antithesis of trends (the press release also lists Charlotte Rampling, Lauren Hutton and Led Zeppelin as the collection’s muses), this matters. Phelan, who says she has never seen Kate wear the same thing twice in all their years of friendship, jumps in to allay her fears: “The collection has got – and I hate saying this word – a timelessness to it. You could dip into it at any time. You would have worn these clothes when you were 18. Nothing has changed – it’s still really your style.”
Moreover, rather than a marketing opportunity, it was important to reimagine pieces, such as a rich blue velvet ’30s coat, for now, because such love-worn treasures (there’s scarcely any velvet left on the elbows of that original outerwear) are almost too threadbare to wear. Keeping vintage – true vintage – alive is important to Moss, who still scours markets (Portobello, Camden) for gems and never (bar an impulse 1stDibs splurge this morning) shops online. “Vintage shops are just combed through now, they charge too much and you just feel like it’s not really vintage anymore – it’s like 10 or 20 years old,” says this staunch rummager. “Vintage, to me, is like the ’30s, ’40s or ’50s. And we didn’t call it vintage, we called it second-hand.”
The piece she’ll make space for in the jackets section of her own mythical archive (reader: there’s an entire room dedicated to shoes, another to bags) is the mac. Oh and the leopard jacket. But the suit is also “gorgeous!” – the watchword of the afternoon. Despite her protestations about definitely not being a designer, Moss has serious designs on our wardrobes. Celebrity collaborations come and go, but this one is worth its salt.
Shop Kate Moss for Zara, priced from £17.99, from 30 November