When Kate Moss walked onto Bottega Veneta’s SS23 catwalk – shirt cuffs rolled up the forearms, hands placed insouciantly into the pockets of her jeans – people online were like: ‘me’. But they aren’t like her, because they aren’t a supermodel with enough lore and legacy for a luxury fashion label to release a fanzine dedicated to their image some 30 years after they were first scouted in an airport. “Kate Moss was my first Google search,” Matthieu Blazy said, describing the genesis of the new coffee table tome, which maps his longstanding fascination with the model.
“She’s the first photo to be printed on the family printer. Whenever I hear a modem, I think of Kate, because I mainly looked for her pictures as a teenager.” Most people might think of The Libertines or Babyshambles, but Blazy hears Moss in a glitching and screeching internet machine. “She became a personal icon. It was, for me, a very serious teenage activity that became an everyday term at home,” he continued. “If I was doing my ‘Kate Moss’, it meant I was in the middle of collecting pictures. This hobby became a sort of education.” Hours of obsessive clicking and right-clicking and saving and printing have given way to a paper-bound zine scrawled in childlike handwriting.
“This fanzine is a tribute to Kate and the pages of a binder that defined my coming of age. She was my first.” Its inside pages are packed with DIY cut-outs of Moss modelling for Chanel and Calvin Klein and recall a time when people used to do stuff with paper. It means – had Blazy been born today – he would have almost definitely been an anonymous admin behind an Instagram account with a name like @katemossarmy or @katemoss_lovers. “Kate’s Book” is the third in a trio of Bottega Veneta zines: one of which showcases Gaetano Pesce’s creations for the label, while the other houses the brand’s SS23 lookbook. Click through the gallery above to see a preview of the Kate Moss fanzine.
