Kate Moss wouldn't let her 15-year-old daughter pose topless — even though she did at that age
They say “Mama knows best” — and when you’re Kate Moss, and your 15-year-old daughter is considering a modeling career, it seems especially fitting.
The 44-year-old supermodel — who rose to fame as a teenager and was constantly ripped for being too skinny, too naked, and too much of a partier — granted a rare interview to Megyn Kelly for Today that aired on Wednesday. While the juiciest questions weren’t asked (seriously — nothing about Johnny Depp or #MeToo?), Moss, who now runs her own agency, and is also still modeling herself, talked about the “pressure” she faced to pose topless when she was starting out. She also made it clear that if her only child, Lila Grace Moss Hack, does follow in her footsteps — as it has long been speculated that she will — she would do so minus the nudity.
“Yeah, there was pressure,” Moss said of taking her clothes off as a young teen. “I did not like it at all when I first started. Then I suppose, [photographer] Mario [Sorrenti] was my boyfriend,” referring to the photographer who shot her iconic Obsession campaign, “so I was kind of used to it. But … I was still always like: ‘Can I just put some clothes on?'” That said, it “was the job, and so I kind of just did it.”
But models today don’t have to. While Moss says the industry today has its minuses — she says it was “more fun” and “freer” when social media didn’t exist — one big plus is that models “don’t have to” pose nude “if they don’t want to do it.” And here’s where Lila factors into it. “I wouldn’t let my daughter do it,” she noted. “I look at her and she’s 15, and to think that I was going topless at her age is crazy.”
So will Lila join the biz? “It’s up to her. I’m leaving it up to her. I will support her, obviously. I’ll be her manager,” Kate said with a laugh. “If she wants to, I’ll support her in anything she wants to do.”
Moss, who also said she doesn’t think the modeling industry is too focused on weight, talked about parenting, saying the birth of her daughter made her “never lonely again. I always had my baby.” The two are really close, and now that Lila’s a teen, “we’re hanging out as friends because she’s getting older. We can go shopping together, and it’s really fun.”
Because Moss has been through it all — horrible relationships, drug abuse — she says that if her daughter is ever having a bad time, something she’ll tell her and she wishes she had known when she was growing up is that, “Tomorrow’s another day. Everything passes,” she said. “You can think it’s terrible and it’s the end of the world, but everything passes. That’s important to remember.”
Moss adds she still lives by the motto “Never complain, never explain” in work and in life. (Funny enough, it was Depp who first said it to her.) She said it means, “Just get on with it. You can’t do anything about what people think of you or if they lie or if it’s not true. It doesn’t matter, because if you know who you are, you can get through.”
And for more than three decades, she’s been getting through.
Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:
