Kate Moss Speaks

She speaks with the husky tones of a girl from Croydon who has smoked Marlboro Lights since she was fourteen. When asked if she has any intention of quitting, she replies, "No, because it's who I am. I don't want to create a phony facade. I think I just have to be myself; otherwise, I'd be a paranoid mess." The antithesis of the airbrushed celebrity, Moss, now 34, has done nothing to disguise her age: Her kohl-lined, chestnut-brown eyes have tiny creases at the edges, and her makeup-free face is as natural as ever, with two little lines across the top of her nose: She has a tendency to wrinkle it when she giggles, which is frequently, because Kate, as the world knows, likes to have a laugh. The reason she won't do Botox is that if a photographer asked her to frown in a picture and she couldn't, she'd be "really embarrassed," she says. When I ask her how her style has changed from her 20s to her 30s, she says there is only one thing she wouldn't wear now -- sneakers with a long evening dress.

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"Modeling is a bit brain-damaging," she said. Launching her own brands was "what I needed to do. ...It's the right time." Her confidence in creating fashion was boosted when she realized the influence she has. "I would see things that I wore sometimes that designers had copied," she said, remembering in particular a yellow chiffon party dress that was promptly reincarnated on the runway. "So I thought, Listen, I could do that." Now, instead of being hired or dropped at the whim of designers, says Kate, "I go to business meetings and tell people what I want and how to do it." (Her preferred look for these meetings, she tells me, is a black or white Chanel power suit, "like Jackie O but with a T-shirt, a power watch from Rolex, and my Vivienne Westwood Sex shoes.")