In one of many stories
“Donatella may be an extreme example,” said Robert Burke, the fashion director of the luxury retailer Bergdorf Goodman. “But the issue isn’t limited to her.” Fake Handbags, Mr. Burke said, “is a fast, difficult, demanding creative business with passionate and fragile people at the center of it who are prone to the kind of weaknesses and insecurities that can result in drug abuse.”
It has been that way for decades, Mr. Burke said. “Look at Replica Handbags.” Look at Calvin Klein, whose troubles with substance abuse have been chronicled extensively. Look, more recently, at Marc Jacobs, whose phenomenal success for his own two labels and for Louis Vuitton, now underpinned by the weekly meetings he sometimes leads at a Narcotics Anonymous chapter in Paris, was once stoked by freebase and crack. Mr. Jacobs is among the few in the business brave enough to discuss openly his struggles with substance abuse. “I used to party a lot in my house, but I don’t live like that anymore,” he once explained to me over dinner at Stresa, the Italian restaurant in Paris that serves as a design world canteen. “Nobody’s throwing drinks across the room now. There isn’t a crack pipe burning on the table.”
Mr. Jacobs may have managed to tame his demons, yet there are many in the business who have not. “They pick on Kate, but, hello, look around, it’s everywhere,” said Joe Zee, the editor in chief of Vitals, the high-end shopping magazine owned by Fairchild Publications, which announced this week it would cease publication. In a previous incarnation, as the Louis Vuitton Handbags director of W, Mr. Zee worked with people from the top echelons of talent in the business. And drug use, he said, was rampant, in particular among models, many of whom enter the business straight out of middle school, too young by law to drink or to buy cigarettes and yet surrounded by adults proffering joints or snorts or Champagne splits at 9 a.m.
In one of many stories Mr. Zee has to tell, a jittery young beauty on a photo shoot compulsively ate sugar from deli packets and spent more time in the bathroom than on the set. When the shoot in question took place she was featured on the cover of most major fashion magazines. This is not, however, to suggest that the fashion business is some Victorian-style den of vice. Ms. Moss’s extramural Fake Louis Vuitton Handbags may not be unique to her or even so unusual. But her embrace of what one could term the high life has been pursued with singular gusto, those who know her say. “She seems to have embraced this myth of the rock ‘n’ roll life,” said the designer Anna Sui, referring to Ms. Moss’s on-again, off-again relationship with the drug-addled rocker Pete Doherty and her enduring friendships with Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull, two rock matrons whose most offhand anecdotes make a Lou Reed lyric seem like a “Sesame Street” theme.
Ms. Moss’s career may not be entirely in tatters, Louis Vuitton Scarves seems, since French Vogue has said it would go forward with plans for her to be guest editor an issue. And her agent, Sarah Doukas of Storm, said on Wednesday in an interview with The Times of London authorized by Ms. Moss that she is close to signing a new deal with a “blue-chip perfume,” although she did not name the brand. Ms. Moss herself issued a statement last week taking “full responsibility for my actions,” an assertion that was widely interpreted as an indication she would enter rehabilitation, as in the past. “She’s not an idiot,” Ms. Doukas said in the interview. “She’ll do what she has to. Ideally she’d lie low for a long time, but there are work commitments.”
So far these have not included the runway work for which she has been celebrated. The Louis Vuitton Shoes so eager in the past to capitalize on her slacker insouciance and celebrity seem to be giving Ms. Moss a pass, although few dispute that an appearance by her would jolt life into a largely inert season. “I don’t know if even she knows what the right choice is anymore,” Ms. Sui, a friend of the model, remarked.
And if Ms. Moss cannot seem to guide herself wisely – after 17 years of plying a trade in which she was from the beginning associated with drugs as the unwitting symbol of heroin chic – what of the hundreds of young women who appear every year at casting calls and the offices of modeling agents, the sort of girls who imagine the fashion business bears some resemblance to the Louis Vuitton Ties that drew 4.72 million viewers to the season’s first episode of “America’s Next Top Model” on UPN?
“I do not agree with the way the press has been so disgusting with Kate,” Tom Pecheux, a makeup artist, said backstage on Wednesday at the Missoni show. “Who are these people to judge this amazing mother, this amazing person, this amazing model?” Mr. Pecheux’s question, while valid, becomes another and more challenging one when he characterizes Ms. Moss’s Gucci Handbags in the context of an industry in which the corporate demands on “the talent” grow with every season, frenetic cycles in which days and nights and even weeks run together in a blur of labor and nerves and almost inevitable self-abuse.
“Remember, there are three continuous weeks of these fashion shows,” Mr. Pecheux said. “The designers may want you around until 5 in the morning for fittings, and then the first show is at 9. There are five Gucci Wallets at least in a day, with the last one at 9. Everyone is working constantly. People are so shocked that models take drugs. But do you know what kind of vitamin can keep you awake that long?”