40 years of growing old disgracefully: As Kate Moss hits a landmark birthday, how decades of wild living have taken their toll

Happy birthday to Kate Moss, who is 40 tomorrow.

Pause for a moment to choke on that indigestible nugget of news. Mossy is 40?

The little waif from Croydon, the she-sprite who almost single-handedly launched heroin chic, the model who went on to become the face of Calvin Klein and Chanel and Rimmel - to name a few - now paddling in the shallows of Old Lady Lake? How on earth did that happen? 

Contrast: Aged 14, and Kate still has a girl-next-door quality in her first professional photo-shoot back in 1988 (left). Meanwhile, a bleary-eyed and dazed Kate looks older than her years in a picture taken last month (right)

Face of things to come: The waif-like South London teen who changed fashion photography for ever

Why, it just seems like yesterday when Kate was first seen posing in her pants in Vogue, framed by a set of fairy lights, back in the summer of 1993.

The famously grungy shots prompted a great deal of vitriol, including the assertion from the then editor of Cosmopolitan, Marcelle d’Argy Smith, that the images were ‘hideous and tragic.

 

I believe they can only appeal to the paedophile market’.

Later that year, 19 and fresh-faced, Kate posed unashamedly topless for a global marketing campaign for Obsession perfume.

Sheer charisma: At 19, Kate is equipped for partying

The ordinary girl from South London, daughter of a barmaid mother and travel agent father, was on her way. 

Since then she has been a beautiful blot on the cultural landscape; somehow hanging on in there through good times and bad, despite scandal, disgrace after disgrace and, of course, drug allegations. 

She has been cast in gold by sculptor Marc Quinn, had her naked portrait painted by Lucian Freud, and gazed down from a million billboards and glossy magazine covers.

She is the most enduring and popular British fashion model of all time, eclipsing even Twiggy.

No one else comes close to Moss’s reach and appeal, her ability to sell clothes across the economic spectrum, from High Street to haute couture.

It seems very doubtful she will, like Twiggy, sail into her 60s approaching national treasure  status and modelling cosy poly-mix jumpers for Marks & Spencer. But you never know.

The odd thing is that, for an age, Kate Moss seemed ageless. While we all got older and the world frayed at the seams, she somehow stayed the same, suspended in the golden syrup of time.

She hovered, like a speyhawk, over her undiminished youth for at least a decade.

Then the sadness of love affairs gone wrong and the toxic fall-out from a party lifestyle suddenly took their toll.

Now here we are at this perilous threshold for any woman, particularly for a model, particularly for a model called Kate Moss. 

Cheekbones at dawn: With film star boyfriend Johnny Depp at the Golden Globes in 1997

A supermodel set: Sharing a joke with Naomi Campbell (left) and Christy Turlington at a 1998 charity event

Broken heart to new love: Kate shows off a gaunter look in 2000 (left) after the split with Johnny Depp, before posing with new partner Jefferson Hack at a 2001 premiere (right)

Just imagine four long decades, 40 summers and winters spent working at the exhausting business of Being Kate.

Of living hard, partying even harder, of wearing that skirt or this jacket just the right way, of Caribbean summers, of epic festival-going, of highly unsuitable boyfriends, of good love gone bad, of squeezing out a child somewhere along the way, and of always refusing to give up, give in, conform, explain herself or grow old gracefully. 

Smoking hot: Forget five-a-day, Kate's a 30-a-day kind of girl (cigarettes, that is!)

On the eve of her birthday, she posed naked in Playboy. The most controversial shot showed her in a bunny outfit, on all fours, with her bottom in the air; an image that feminists rightly hated. 

Yet Kate Moss just does not care, never has done. 

Charity, good works, setting a fine example? None of this ever mattered. She stands for nothing except herself, she does nothing that is not self-indulgent, there is no moral dimension to anything she does or says. 

She makes around £12 million a year, and much of that fortune is based on the incontrovertible premise that she is greatly admired and adored by teenage girls. Yet she accepts none of the responsibility that comes with the territory. 

For example, instead of joining in the size-zero debate and encouraging potentially anorexic young women to live and eat healthily, she instead claimed ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’.

In 2011, on No Smoking Day, she walked down Marc Jacobs’s catwalk puffing on a cigarette; a rancid bid to glamorise smoking that put her on the front pages.
There are still moments, of course, when her beauty can take your breath away. In comparison to the current crop of bland young models, like Miranda Kerr for example, she has a much more interesting face and body.

While other Nineties supermodels such as Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington and even Blood Diamonds Naomi Campbell have faded from centre stage, she alone has hung on to her top spot as one of the world’s great models. 

Different looks: Six months later, in August 2002, and she's in the pink and pregnant (left), while birthday girl Kate opts for curls (right) at her notorious 30th bash in 2004

High society: Relaxed alongside J.K. Rowling and the Queen at a Palace reception for women achievers

In 2005, photographs surfaced that appeared to show her sniffing cocaine, but even this did not damage her brand in the long-term.

Although she was dropped by  several clients, including Burberry, she returned the following year to make more money, not less. 

'That dewy incandescence, the button-bright promise of her earlier years, has mouldered into something darker'

So she is not quite middle-aged now, not in the parameters of this modern world, but she is certainly through the greying portal.

That dewy incandescence, the button-bright promise of her earlier years, has mouldered into something darker and far less wholesome.

We have had Pretty Kate, Icon Kate and Incomparable Kate. Sadly, we have also had Grunge Kate, Drunk Kate and Cokehead Kate.

From ingenue to maturity, from joys and heartaches, you can map out her life and changing looks boyfriend by boyfriend.

During the Johnny Depp years, she was at her most beautiful and happiest.

Front page news - for all the wrong reasons: The 'drugs and rock star lifestyle' revelations almost wrecked her career in 2005, but within months she was back

Tired and emotional: Kate is pictured with druggie Pete Doherty at Glastonbury in 2007 (left), before the hard-partying lifestyle seems to catch up with the supermodel (right)

Look at her! Incandescent. With a Hollywood star on her arm, everything was possible. With the world unfurling like an endless red carpet, she was utterly radiant. 

Then Johnny left her, and a spark within was extinguished, never to be revived.

She chopped all her lustrous locks into a severe crop; a heartbreak hairdo, the outward manifestation of inner grief.

After this came the mystery of Jefferson Hack, who seemed to blow through her life like a chimera.

Then there was the baby, Lila Grace, though maternity has never been an all-consuming role. 

Polished: Kate proves she can still scrub up when she wants to in 2010 (left) ... but without the help of make-up (right), the years are starting to take their toll

Settling down? Kate is all smiles in 2011 as she weds her rocker beau Jamie Hine

After this, it was into the terrible darkness with Pete Doherty. Here, you can see the damage clearly, like the gradual wind erosion on a crumbling statue.

Kate always had a weakness for a bad rock ’n’ roll boy, and he was the utter distillation of bad; he could hardly have been worse.

There were times when it seemed she would never come out of those years, the drug stories and cancelled contracts. 

Yet the fashion world being the amoral cesspit it is, she survived and thrived. In 2007, after briefly becoming engaged, she and Doherty split.

The next year, she and new boyfriend Jamie Hince were photographed covered in cuts and bruises.

They claimed they had sustained their injuries when a box of Christmas decorations fell on them. 

They married, Vogue publishing the wedding pictures. Kate carries on, still modelling, still living a grand life behind the walls of her Cotswolds mansion and London home.

As she turns 40, is her smoky charm and louche appeal beginning to curdle?

After spending more than half her life in the public eye, Kate Moss is still in demand, although sometimes she carries more than a hint of the party coming to an end, a suggestion that she is stuck in the dry dust of the morning after the life before.

But it is not over. Not just yet anyway.