Kate Moss Research Articles

Germany: the House of Birkenstock—rise and fall under copyright law?

Abstract The House of Birkenstock, established in Germany in 1774, has become a fashion icon, not least thanks to support from ageless influencers such as Kate Moss and Gwyneth Paltrow. On its way to fame, Birkenstock has sought to enforce a variety of different intellectual property rights in court, but with only average, if not little, success. Claims under German copyright law, however, turned out to be quite promising—until January 2024 when the Cologne Appeal Court intervened.

“Nothing Tastes as Good as Skinny Feels”

There has always been something compelling about extreme bodies. Kate Moss exemplifies “the waif,” a body type both frightening and appealing. She is one of the most common celebrities discussed on pro-anorexia (or, pro-ana) websites. To explore the connection between Moss’s body and pro-ana participation, this article examines the potential for an extraordinary body to solidify the aims of an extremist group and to draw in new members. Her unusually slender form affirms this pro-starvation cluster by physically representing the emotional distress that lies at its core. There is no conclusive evidence that Moss suffers from an eating disorder, and she has been open about discouraging people from starving themselves to look like her. Nevertheless, she has been framed as a unique icon in the pro-ana sphere, despite her personal intent, due to the extreme nature of her body. She helps members to express mental illness and severe emotional distress via an emaciated frame and grungy-but-cool aesthetic. She therefore gives people a way to explore sickness and femininity concurrently, which is especially relevant for young women with eating disorders. The pro-ana community has adopted her as a cult icon for these reasons. Here, I analyse this process using Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge’s sociological scholarship on the social role of religion broadly and “cult formation” more specifically. This raises important questions about consent in cult formation and the role required of a leader.

Of Kate Moss & Marilyn Monroe: Body Dissatisfaction and its Relation to Media Consumption, Body Mass Index and Self-Esteem in Malaysian College Women

Can individual differences in body dissatisfaction be predicted? What would those predictors be? This study investigated whether media consumption, self-esteem, and Body Mass Index (BMI) were predictors of body dissatisfaction. The sample constituted of 149 female college students from 4 universities in Malaysia. To answer the question of the study, participants’ height and weight were collected along with their answers to Media Consumption Scale, the Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem Scale, and Body Esteem for Adolescents and Adults. A few analyses such as the independent samples t-test, One-way ANOVA, Pearson’s Correlation and Multiple Regression were conducted on the data. Results of the study indicated that self-esteem and BMI could predict body dissatisfaction in college women. However, the study indicated that media consumption did not. The findings were discussed with regard to relevant theories such as the self-discrepancy theory, social comparison theory, and objectification theory.

Do We Have the Knowledge to Address Homelessness?

AbstractVarious forms of housing exclusion are a reality for millions of people across the globe. For people who are homeless in advanced industrialized economies, housing exclusion often co-exists with social service engagement. This essay reviews three books about how homelessness is conceptualized and caused, and how we, as social service providers and social scientists, respond to homelessness: Housing First: Ending Homelessness, Transforming Systems, and Changing Lives, by Deborah Padgett, Benjamin Henwood, and Sam Tsemberis; Women Rough Sleepers in Europe: Homelessness and Victims of Domestic Abuse, by Kate Moss and Paramjit Singh; and The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in the United States, by Craig Willse. It concludes that Housing First achieves justice for deeply marginalized individuals but that the effectiveness of Housing First represents a disturbing reminder of our failed welfare states and public institutions.

This Year’s Model: Fashion, Media, and the Making of Glamour

This Year’s Model: Fashion, Media, and the Making of Glamour

Of Kate Moss & Marilyn Monroe: Body Dissatisfaction and its Relation to Media Consumption, Body Mass Index and Self-Esteem in Malaysian College Women

Of Kate Moss & Marilyn Monroe: Body Dissatisfaction and its Relation to Media Consumption, Body Mass Index and Self-Esteem in Malaysian College Women

A Waif's Progress

This paper draws on a case study of media images of the British model Kate Moss to think through questions of affect, ideology, and pleasure in relation to fashion imagery. The question of whether and to what extent media images affect spectators is central to contemporary feminist media studies. The “turn to affect” has revitalised the debate about the extent to which media images can be held accountable for oppressive effects on the spectator's body image, with affect theory often being pitted “against” feminism in this regard. As Clare Hemmings states, affect theory emphasises how emotions place individual bodies in a circuit of feeling and response, connecting them to one another in ways that are potentially transformative. Through a critical reading of Kate Moss as a highly visible figure of projection, anxiety, and fantasy, I aim to show that whilst affects may be unpredictable, in that some media images become particular objects of attachment and anxiety, they are also mediated and political: that they engage us in intimate relations with ideologies of gender, power, and embodiment.

Kate Moss, icon of postfeminist disorder

This paper investigates fashion model Kate Moss as an icon of postfeminist disorder by unpacking artist Marc Quinn's recent sculptures of her. A feminist media-studies analysis elucidates Quinn's interpretation of Moss as ‘a knotted Venus of our age' by interrogating his textual juxtaposition of Eastern and Western symbolism. It reveals that Moss offers meanings of female beauty and sexuality that play with notions of indulgence and discipline, and the blurred interconnections between the two underlie her aesthetic and celebrity status. Quinn's depictions lend themselves to an interpretation of the cultural conflicts that surround the pursuit and embodiment of femininity in our contemporary epoch. In this light, Moss' representations and lifestyle situate her as a cultural agent of postfeminist disorder who advocates powerful and problematic messages that commodify cultural meanings of the female body.

Take Your Pick: Kate Moss or the Girl Next Door?

<h3>ABSTRACT</h3> In the last several years, marketers have started to use “nonidealized” models in advertisements (i.e., “Dove9s Campaign for Real Beauty”). Little is known, however, about the effects of “nonidealized” advertising on consumers and whether this type of advertising—when compared to idealized advertising—is truly beneficial for the branded products promoted in these ads. Based on a sample of 347 French women exposed to either idealized or “nonidealized” models, the authors established that the way these advertising models have an effect on brand responses—specifically, the attitude toward (and the purchase intention of) a brand—operates through a dual-process model. When a viewer had a high sense of self-esteem, it was crucial that both processes be understood simultaneously: the effect of the portrayed model9s body image on the brand responses can be suppressed by the model-evaluation process. The authors also note that consumers9 ages influenced the self-evaluative process following a quadratic function. Their place of residence (i.e., urban versus rural) influenced the self- and model-evaluation processes.

The devil in high heels: drugs, symbolism and Kate Moss

This paper contributes to critical voices on the issue of organisational responses to employee drug use. It does so by exploring symbolic readings of organisations’ relations with drugs and drug‐taking. Our focus is recent coverage of, and organisational responses to, the UK tabloid media’s exposé of fashion supermodel Kate Moss’s alleged cocaine use. We consider that the celebrity endorsement in this particular case highlights the ambiguities created by the symbolic associations between the organisation and the ‘image’ projected by the celebrity. Overall, we use this case to explore symbolic relationships between drugs, sex, femininity and organisation. Through highlighting these connections, we question further the rationality of organisational responses to employee drug use and, utilising Derrida’s (1981) extension of Plato’s notion of the pharmakon, consider whether workforce drug testing might be fruitfully seen as a symbolic mechanism for scapegoating and sacrifice in order to protect the organisation’s (masculine) moral order.

Head of a Woman

Creativity may come easily for many artists, but sometimes inspiration arrives in the form of a muse—John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Calvin Klein and Kate Moss, Woody Allen and his cast of thousands. Impressionist Henri Matisse (1869-1954) often found inspiration in his beautiful models.

Unbound &amp; Branded (review)

Reviewed by: Unbound & Branded Celia Lisset Alvarez Christine Stewart-Nuñez . Unbound & Branded. Finishing Line Press. If one defines a chapbook as a tightly themed exploration of a single subject, then Christine Stewart-Nuñez's Unbound & Branded is the perfect chapbook. Like her previous collection from Finishing Line Press, The Love of Unreal Things, which explores the life of St. Catherine of Siena, Unbound & Branded takes the life of a woman as its subject, this time supermodel Kate Moss. Stewart-Nuñez shows her versatility in this jump, taking as her muse not just the woman herself but Moss's role as waif icon through an exploration of the September 2003 issue of W magazine. This issue, which features a portfolio of Moss photographs and paintings, is Stewart-Nuñez's canvas. Taking selected portraits as the subject for her poems, Stewart-Nuñez attempts to dissect and unravel Moss's mystique, and, in the attempt, loses herself: "I'm no closer / to knowing her than / when I first traced my name / across her lips." Unbound & Branded is an incredible collection of images and pop-culture iconography that ranges from the witty to the brilliant. With the skill of a self-confessed "lepidopterist," Stewart-Nuñez teases Moss like a modern-day Lovelace with an enigmatic Clarissa. She seems confounded by Moss's ubiquitous presence in our world, her inability to extract value from Moss's flaunted reticence. As she quotes in the Alexander Bolomolny epigraph to "Geometry of Moss," the model belongs to the realm of "pure abstractions, creations of the human mind." Moss is what you make of her, and this slipperiness is what both infuriates the poet and drives Unbound & Branded, as the oxymoronic title implies. In "Obsession," a masterfully crafted sestina that plays with Moss's work for the Calvin Klein perfume ads, Stewart-Nuñez focuses on the way Moss's beauty affects Anne, a thirteen-year-old girl gripped by Moss's spell. Simultaneously predictable yet clever, Stewart-Nuñez turns the nature of the obsession around, from that of lovers to that of the young woman mercilessly self-destructing to fit Moss's ideal. The poem touches on the ever-raging controversy over models' emaciated bodies (epitomized by Moss). She is described as "a mere whisper—the perfect model." Yet Stewart-Nuñez does not simply cater to a feminist sensibility by echoing the large body of work that discusses the silencing of girls vis-à-vis their silent models. She crafts a metaphoric relationship—grounded in sharp syntax and clear images—that defines Moss's power over the imagination in just that which makes her so detestable to her critics. Anne desires Kate's "hollowness of body," a phrase that refers not only to her physical proportions but also to her status as vessel. In the envoy, Stewart Nuñez writes, "Anne joins Kate on the wall, fills blank spots / as the one girls long to be. They'll look / at her body—a perfect, two-dimensional model." The poem is a departure in that, unlike the other poems in the collection, it does not focus on a portrait from the W retrospective of Moss herself, but rather on a Steven Klein photograph of a room (perhaps a [End Page 185] young girl's room) covered with photographs of Moss. In many ways, this poem is the heart of the collection, taking Moss's influence away from the public stage, as Klein does, and into the private world of a young girl alone in her room with a glossy magazine, scissors, and tape. At the same time, Stewart-Nuñez is able to connect herself to Moss's subversive abilities. In "Red Light District," a restrained series of couplets based on photographs by Michael Thompson, she draws Moss mouth parted as if she meansto speak. Instead, the camera flasheslike a punch, sealing wordswithin her. What would Moss say if allowed to speak unmediated? We never know; the brutal "punch" of the camera always silences her and imposes its own meanings. Moss is a victim in this poem, "black / and crimson," a "cluster on her neck / like a bruise," her...

Ordinary clothes for extraordinary people

It was not the likes of Kate Moss or Naomi Campbell who turned out to model for a fashion show on November 10th 2007, it was seven extraordinary people, some of whom had battled cancer and other life threatening diseases, they modelled as part of an open day to raise money for charity. This was hosted by the Ileostomy Association Charity for Berks, Bucks, and Oxon, and supported by SecuriCare (Medical) Ltd. who also sponsor the Stoma Care Nurses who work at Wycombe Hospital.

DOCUMENTING KATE MOSS

In the early 1990s a new image of British national identity emerged on the pages of The Face, Dazed and Confused and Vogue. Fashion and style photography created an aesthetic out of the lives of young Londoners and the places they lived in, including second-hand markets, the rave scene and shared flats. Corinne Day's seemingly private photo-diaries became the basis for her fashion magazine work. In these pictures she featured her friends, her flat, her sofa and fairy lights, and also a girl called Kate Moss who “didn't look very much like a model.” For Day and other innovators, new ways of documenting contemporary reality were achieved through fashion and women's magazines, rather than by classic photojournalism.

On faces and defacement: the case of Kate Moss

This paper takes issue with what seem to be standard practices of at least some organizations that use models in their ad campaigns. These organizations know that many of their models have had drug problems but refuse either to tolerate this or to help them. Some organizations have, allegedly in the name of a responsibility for the health of their customers, rather opted for a firm condemnation of the practices in which models such as Kate Moss apparently engage. This raises questions about hypocrisy. The paper uses Levinas's concept of the face critically to describe what might be going on in the conflict between Moss and some of the companies she worked for. Moss is arguably understood by these companies as a role model who should not engage with drugs or street life. Against these more or less patronizing tendencies, the paper claims that it is not so much the face but processes of defacement that should trouble us from a moral perspective. The face, it is maintained, is not only ethical but also has a materiality. In opposition to what is maintained by at least some scholars of Levinas, art, literature and history have alerted us over and over again that the face is anything but indelible. Some examples from art show us the versatility and vulnerability of the face. The gossip and hype about what came to be known as the Kate Moss affair stands, it is argued, in a long misogynic tradition of defacement.

’About a Girl’

Corinne’s friend Rose is sprawled on an old couch in Corinne’s flat in London. Surrounding Rose on the beer-stained carpet are a few mugs, an ashtray and a telephone cord. The photo is a record of Corinne Day’s reality from a time when she was still on the dole and partying hard. Her bleak but intimate photography became famous in the fashion pages of magazines like The Face and Vogue, where her early photographs of an unknown young model called Kate Moss created the visual style known as ‘dirty realism’ or ‘grunge’. As she describes it, ‘There we were struggling to pay the rent, living in a dump, surrounded by glamorous magazines that were so far away from our own level of living... Fashion magazines had been selling sex and glamour for far too long. I wanted to instill some reality into a world of fantasy’ (Cotton, 2000). Concentrating on British photographer Corinne Day’s work, this article explores the interface between photojournalism and fashion. Day’s photographs are documents of contemporary life but destined for fashion pages. Beyond its ostensible purpose, contemporary fashion photography in magazines like Vogue can be seen to continue and extend the purposes of photojournalism in the documentary tradition. Furthermore, the compulsion towards art and aesthetics found in photojournalism since the days of Picture Post indicates that the same boundary has been pushed from the other side too, ever since photojournalism’s ascendance. This article therefore traces convergences among some aesthetic, discursive and institutional oppositions that have long been kept carefully separated: ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ worlds; national identity and art; journalism and fashion.

On Seminars, Ritual, and Cowboys

On Seminars, Ritual, and Cowboys

On Seminars, Ritual, and Cowboys

On Seminars, Ritual, and Cowboys

Mediating third-wave feminism: appropriation as postmodern media practice

In this essay, we explore how sensibilities of third-wave feminism are appropriated by and in the context of postmodern media such that they are commodified, reinscribed, and sold to audiences in an hegemonic fashion. To this end, we analyze gendered representations of women located at various mediated sites of popular culture in whom gender is conspicuous and primary: Alanis Morissette, Kate Moss, and Ally McBeal. We argue that, in each case, the appropriation of third-wave feminist tenets is accomplished via a postmodern aesthetic code of juxtaposition that serves to recontextualize and reinscribe those sensibilities in a way that ultimately functions to reify dominant patriarchal codes and discourses.

A11. The influence of the media on eating disorders

Background The cause of eating disorders is multifactorial. One of these is sociocultural factors which include family, peers and the media. It has been suggested that constant media pressures can lead to body dissatisfaction, which may result in distorted eating patterns. Aims To review the role of the media in relation to eating disorders Results There has been a shift in the media portrayal of the ’ideal’ body size for women, from the voluptuous curved figure of Marilyn Monroe in the 1950s to a thinner ’waif-like’ look of Kate Moss in the 1980s. In the mass media shape and weight define perfection. Women perceive themselves as being bigger than they actually are. Their figure deviates from the ideal thus resulting in self body dissatisfaction. ’All I see is these pretty models, I wish I could look like one of them.’ ( Wertheim et al. 1997 ) The ’ideal’ body image is far from the physiologic norm. Supermodels are born with a specific body type and what the public doesn’t understand is that they cannot diet to achieve it. ’Women don’t set out to be anorexic, they begin by thinking they’re too fat because everywhere they go the media is telling them that they are right’ ( Barrett, 1997) Products are often advertised displaying the ideal body shape in the hope that it will enhance the product and create body dissatisfaction. Purchasing the product is perceived as a positive step towards reaching the ’perfect’ body image. Concern surrounds the appearance of such advertisements in magazines aimed at adolescent girls, as at this age they are particularly vulnerable to the influences of the media. Stice and Shaw (1994) stated that exposure to the thin ’idea’ may have a negative effect on emotions leading to body dissatisfaction. Such emotions include depression, stress, guilt, shame, insecurity, unhappiness, and lower self-confidence. A study by Schotte et al. (1990) indicated that negative emotions can disrupt eating behaviour. Dieters watching a frightening film increased their food intake, whereas nondieters did not. Conclusion The media are not solely responsible for eating disorders but they do contribute by promoting the ’ideal’ physique. There is some resistance to media messages, as the majority of people do not develop distorted eating patterns.