by On a summer day in June 1994, Kate Moss, then just 20 years old, and British photographer Glen Luchford set out across New York for a fashion reportage show that captured the energy and beauty of the young model. indestructible, in love and on the edge. fame and fortune, and the energy and light of the city that was about to change as well.
Thousands of images from that shoot, which took place over a day and used more than 200 rolls of film, have now been published in Rossan domainnow from Idea Books, named after the downtown ballroom that hosted the orchestras of jazz greats Louis Armstrong and Count Basie.
Like that music, the images convey the purity of another era – a day in New York, comedy and beauty, sex and sex. And they marked the extraordinary moment that propelled Moss, who turns 50 next month, into the fashion stratosphere as the most influential model of her generation.
“It’s a book about New York as much as it is about Kate,” Luchford tells the Observer. “I saw Taxi driver and he was very glad that the city still looked like that. But I realized that New York was changing and I wanted to capture it. So we went out on the streets, we went crazy, and that’s what came out.”
Months earlier, Luchford had lent Moss taxi money to get home to Croydon. Now in New York, Moss’ famous Calvin Klein ads were up in Times Square. “New York can be so quick in the way it can inject a person’s career. She was sent over to see Steven Meisel and Calvin, and went home on Concorde. She did it [in] one week. It was a really fun moment that we all took part in.”
But the shoot was unsuccessful at the time. Harper’s Bazaar, then under the direction of Liz Tilberis, she ordered color pictures – black and white, along with any hint of underwear or nappies, which could not be published. Luchford, says stylist Sciascia Gambaccini, stuck to her guns. “I told him we have to shoot color or they will kill us. But he said it never colored his life.”
The group, which included makeup artist Kay Montana, took off in a camper van around New York with photographer friend Mario Sorrenti, who gave Moss impromptu boxing lessons. The caravan visited Times Square and the Chelsea Hotel, as well as nearby high street sex shops.
“It was gritty New York, the kind of city that Glen wanted to discover and be excited about,” recalls Gambaccini. “And Kate was just at the point where she was exploding in the United States. She had just started dating Johnny Depp and she had her eyes set on a star.” Gambaccini and Moss were in Mexico, and Moss insisted on stopping in Dallas on the way home to buy a Stetson hat.
“I said okay. We stopped and got a hat. I had a bag of clothes, sequined clothes, all mismatched. So I said, ‘You keep the hat on and we’ll take it off – you’re in a cowboy hat in New York.’” Then they just had to follow their model and, Gambaccini posted on Instagram, “dance to the beat”.
But there is something else in the pictures – faces, sights and attitudes of a New York that no longer exists. In his book Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, the literary critic Samuel R Delany described the changes and the terrible social detachment that occurred in the community around Times Square, which was about to be sanitized by mayor Rudy Giuliani with the help of Disney and other entertainment giants. “In the rush to meet the new, there is much that was beautiful as well as much that was shoddy, much that was dilapidated and much that was pleasant, much that was inefficient and much that was functional, gone,” Delany wrote.
Luchford recalls first entering this area which Delany described as “a complex of interconnected systems and subsystems”. “It took my imagination,” he says. “I went to Times Square to see him RobotCop. There was a prostitute sitting behind me giving a blow job, a man to my right smoking crack. I think the most surprising thing about RoboCop was that every time someone got shot, everyone in the theater started laughing, joining the film, which you would never get in England.”
The pictures Luchford and Gambaccini brought in were not well received. “I was delighted but I immediately quit the magazine and was never booked again,” recalls Luchford. “I was a bit hurt but now I understand a lot… I was just taking pictures and not paying any attention to fashion.”
“The editors said, ‘Oh my God, she has dirty hair, she doesn’t look clean, and the pictures are black and white,'” recalls Gambaccini. “I was going into the hospital. So I said, ‘I don’t know. Here are the pictures, guys get it out.” The pictures ran, but with a color wash over them. “Then they became the epitome of cool ’90s fashion … and all hell broke loose because editors didn’t know whether to hate it or love it.”
For Moss, too, the pictures are a sticking point. She would no longer be just Kate but Kate the supermodel, and fashion entered the industrial period of corporate brands that Luchford called it. The friends had to become more serious. “It was the last fun period,” he says. “We were friends, laughing hysterically, drinking and smoking cigarettes. It was all very unprofessional, quite amateurish and probably why they have great pictures. Nobody was taking him seriously.”
