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Up. Kate Moss
It is a fact that cannot be ignored, denied or brushed away with an airy, “Well that's very much her own business, isn't it? I don't think we should comment on personal issues” any more: Kate Moss has put on weight. The woman who was once so slender that she made leggings look baggy, appears to have put on about a stone and a half, and now has things most women have been rocking for a while: a belly, breasts, thighs you could disable a man with, in a good way, etc.
This is, of course, seismic news in the World of Women. For if Kate Moss has put on weight, then we are all, ipso facto, off the hook! The rules all change. There is peace in our time, swords will be beaten into ploughshares and Peter will become High King over all at Cair Paravel.
At the launch of the New York Topshop last week, Moss was smoky-eyed and serene in a clingy, floor-length, emerald green dress, in which you could see a distinct curve to her tum. Not a concave curve, you understand - as seen on skinny Russian teenage models - but a convex one. As if in acknowledgement that a woman's lower torso has to hold liver, kidneys, pancreas, spleen and a tennis court full of intestines, and clearly cannot do this in something that measures 20ins around.
And yet, despite Moss having the temerity to have a waistline big enough to fit all her innards in, everyone behaved perfectly normally around her. Indeed, not only was she not thrown down a well - but she was allowed in a fashion shop! While people photographed her! As a representative! And acted like it was all OK! In a world where Jessica Simpson's 1stone weight gain makes CNN, the former EastEnders actress Natalie Cassidy is being hounded into total dysmorphia for hitting a size 14, supermodel Kate Moss's round belly is like Rosa Parkes, finally digging in her heels and sitting up the front of the bus.
Of course, Moss's triumphant entrance into Having An Ass City has not been without cost. For four months, she has had to put up with the tabloids, and the Mail, constantly circling pictures, screaming, with almost admirably brutal rudeness: “IS SHE PREGNANT?” Similarly, references to her “sagging” breasts have become frequent, accompanied by ludicrously unrepresentative shots of her sitting down, leaning forward, tilting to the left, etc. But if anyone can brush these slights off her shoulders, as so much dust, it is Moss. She did, after all, go out with the pop-rock tramp Pete Doherty. Being the world's first supermodel with an arse should be easy by comparison.
