Kate Moss says she felt objectified, “vulnerable and scared” during the Calvin Klein shoot

Advertisement

Kate Moss says she felt objectified, "vulnerable and scared" during the Calvin Klein shoot

Reflecting on her 1992 Calvin Klein campaign shoot with Mark Wahlberg, Kate Moss says she doesn’t have “very good memories” of working with the actor.

“He was very macho and it was all about him and he had a big following,” Moss said. “And I was just such a model.”

The 48-year-old model reflected on the infamous shoot while appearing on the BBC Radio 4 show Desert Island SlicesShe shared that she felt “completely comfortable.” [objectified] and vulnerable and scared” since she was 17 or 18 at the time. She added: “I think they played on my vulnerability. I was pretty young and innocent, so Calvin loved that.”

She even spoke of suffering from anxiety before the shoot. “I didn’t feel good at all before the shoot. For about a week or two I couldn’t get out of bed and had severe anxiety, and the doctor gave me Valium,” she said.

Moss said the anxiety would manifest as nausea, but her use of the medication was closely monitored and controlled by her then-boyfriend’s mother, Francesca Sorrenti, with whom she was living at the time. “After the shoot, everything was fine and the anxiety kind of subsided,” Moss said.

It’s not the first time Moss has spoken out about the photoshoot and shared bad memories from it. In fact, in an interview with vanity fair In 2012, she said she regretted the shoot, although it greatly contributed to her fame.

“I had a nervous breakdown when I was 17 or 18 working with Marky Mark and Herb Ritts,” she told the publication. “It didn’t feel like me at all. I felt really bad for sitting on this muscular guy. I do not want it. I couldn’t get out of bed for two weeks. I thought I was going to die.”

She continued, “No one cares about you mentally. There is massive pressure to do what you have to do.”

Wahlberg later addressed her comments during an interview The guard in 2020. “I think I was probably a little rough around the edges. I kind of did my thing,” he said. “I wasn’t very… sophisticated, let’s put it that way.”

On Desert Island Discsshe noted that this wasn’t the only time she’d felt taken advantage of.

“I had a terrible experience for a bra catalog and I was probably only 15 and he said, ‘Take your top off.’ And I took my top off and I was very shy about my body at the time. And he said, ‘Take your bra off,’ and I could feel something was wrong, so I got my stuff and ran away,” she said, adding that the experience was “sharpened.” [her] instincts” by which she lived the rest of her career.

Even with her best friend and photographer Corinne Day, Moss said she “cried a lot” when it came to photoshoots that felt too exposed.

“I was very, very conscious of my body and she said, ‘If you don’t take your top off, I’m not going to book you ell.’ And I would cry,” Moss recalled, particularly as she reflected on her appearance on the cover of The face Magazine in 1990 when she was just 16 years old. “[Day] got what she wanted and I suffered for her, but in the end they did me really, really good. You changed my career.”

Now a mother and a talent agency owner herself, Moss struggles to protect her clients. Her daughter Lila is one of them.

“I said to her, ‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. If you don’t want to do this shoot, if you don’t feel comfortable, if you don’t want to model, don’t do it,'” Moss said. “I take care of my models. I make sure they’re on the shoots with agents together so that when they’re being taken advantage of, there’s someone who says, ‘I don’t think that’s appropriate.’”

She added, “I don’t know if that’s universal, but it’s what I can do.”

Wellness, parenting, body image and more: get to know it who Behind huh with the Yahoo Life newsletter. Sign up here.

You May Also Like