Kate: Mario Sorrenti’s Intimate Portrait of a Future Ico
New book review & shop announcement
A sun-drenched holiday that rewrote fashion history
Before the world knew her name, an 18-year-old Kate Moss escaped to the British Virgin Islands with her boyfriend, then-rising Italian photographer Mario Sorrenti. Armed with nothing but natural light and 35 mm film, Sorrenti spent the week documenting Moss’s fragile self-confidence and astonishing poise. Two years later, Calvin Klein’s creative team saw the contact sheets and commissioned Sorrenti to shoot the 1993 Obsession campaign—an advertisement that helped detonate Moss’s meteoric rise and redefined the decade’s aesthetic.
Why this 2024 edition matters
First published in 2018 and now reissued by Phaidon in June 2024, Kate gathers 50 of those island photographs in a beautifully enlarged hardback (308 × 292 mm), printed in velvety tritone on uncoated stock and housed in a cloth-covered clamshell box. The 120-page volume feels more like a portfolio than a coffee-table compendium, matching the tactile intimacy of the images themselves.
Between vulnerability and power
Leafing through Kate is a quiet act of time travel. Sorrenti’s lens lingers on close-ups—freckles, sea-salted hair, half-closed lids—rendered with a softness that belies Moss’s later supermodel mythology. The absence of styling, retouching, or studio lights lets the viewer sense how precarious and radical “realness” felt in an era still dominated by Amazonian glamazons. In his new introductory essay, Sorrenti recalls how “time stood still” during that week: the photographs, he notes, were “never meant for anyone but us.”
A touchstone for ’90s minimalism
Fashion historians often point to these pictures as the birthplace of the 1990s pared-back aesthetic: raw, androgynous, emotionally direct. Vogue has called the series “an important piece of fashion history,” and with good reason—its influence is still visible in today’s bare-faced campaigns and grain-heavy editorials.
Book-lover’s production values
Beyond its cultural cachet, Kate is as much a design object as it is a document. The tipped-on cover image echoes deluxe 1960s photobooks; the deep-shadow tritone printing preserves every grain of Sorrenti’s negatives; and the generous white margins invite slow, meditative viewing. For collectors, there’s quiet delight in the book’s weight, the box’s soft hinge, and the faint scent of ink that escapes on first opening.
Available now in our shop
Whether you’re a Moss devotee, a photography student, or simply craving an antidote to digital gloss, Kate offers 1990s authenticity in its purest form. The new 2024 edition is in stock now in our shop—ready to ship, ready to inspire, ready to remind us how a few rolls of film can change fashion forever.
— Hugo Cavendish, Fashion & Culture Editor
