A year ago, Kate Moss had never pitched herself for a job—why would she?—until longtime friend and co-conspirator Katy England persuaded the super to offer up her archive as the inspiration for a Zara collection. One rather professional PDF—with thanks to England’s son Wolf—later, and the pair landed the gig.
Fast forward to November 27 and, after a fateful morning raiding Moss’s designated dress space in her mythical-sounding storage facility and a summer spent flitting to and from Zara’s Spanish HQ, the edit of quintessentially Kate pieces came to light at a London party in Oswald’s.
A word on the guest list: wow. With Moss’s rolodex to hand, Inditex chairwoman Marta Ortega Pérez received affirmative RSVPs from Phoebe Philo and Max Wigram, Rose Ferguson and Jake Chapman, Edward Enninful and Alec Maxwell, Courtney Love, Sadie Frost, Chioma Nnadi, Bella Freud and Tim Walker. The Vogue cover star’s partner in crime England attended with her husband Bobby Gillespie, plus sons Wolf and Lux, who sat on the “kids’ table” with Zara lookbook models Ch’lita Collins and Ella Richards. Like her mother, Lila Moss was resplendent in a black beaded confection that had an air of flapper—family friend Kim Jones decreed this a trend before bowing out at Fendi—but still looked timeless for party season in 2024.
For an industry figurehead who maintains the best bashes are always at home—“everyone’s dressing up, it wasn’t meant to be one”—it was clear Kate had trained her inner circle well for her big night. Jess Morris, Corra Corré, Charlotte Tilbury, Lucie de la Falaise, and Tish Weinstock all stuck to Moss’s tried-and-tested partywear advice: “Black, always black.” And despite the model’s protestations that she never likes having her picture taken as herself, finding it much easier to embody a character in front of the lens, she looked every inch the glamorous hostess.
Note the bracelets snaking up Kate’s arms—which, like the rest of the capsule, will drop on Zara.com on November 30. Inspired by one of the best gifts Moss has ever received—a Victorian box (“one of those glass ones with the little legs”) stuffed with vintage and thrifted jewelry—she used to take the wristlets on fashion shoots until they lost their elastic and vanished somewhere amidst all the magazine editorials and brand campaigns. “I needed them!” Moss told us of recreating the stackable charms at a high-street price point. This mood, for giving her fashion treasures a greater life span, permeates the new Zara pieces, from the blue velvet coat inspired by a love-worn ’30s gem that’s almost too threadbare to wear to the chic replica of that gold Lurex Glasto look she knows every festival goer has had on their mental mood board since the early ’00s.
Moss will not be going to Worthy Farm this year—“the kids are going now, I can’t”—but we’d bet good money on her being tempted back into that admittedly overwhelming archive for Zara part two. “I’m not a designer,” she is keen to clarify. “These are things that I would have worn when I was 18 and that I would still wear now at 50.” Just don’t expect to see Moss styling last night’s little black dress the same way again. The beauty of her style—and why we’ll all be buying in—lies in how she, as another longtime friend, Kate Phelan, explains: always “puts clothes together differently and in an original way.” There’s a timelessness that radiates from everything she turns her hand to.
Step inside Kate Moss’s Zara launch party, here.
Cre: VOGUE
