ABSTRACT
Kate Moss is a very troubling figure, and a prime indicator of the degraded popular culture. In her ads, Moss often looks like a vulnerable and compliant child, stripped for sexual use. Her photos show fleeting references to masturbation, bestiality, incest, and violence. The usual interpretation of no-frills nymphets like Moss is that they represent a reaction to the busty Amazonian models of the 1980s, and express the bleak, anti-glamour, anti-status spirit of the 1990s. Calvin Klein says they represent a return to a more sensitive, more fragile beauty. There is the personal input of Calvin Klein to consider. In Obsession, the new biography of the designer by Steven Gaines and Sharon Churcher, he is portrayed as a sexually ambiguous figure. Klein eroticizes both sexes in his ads, but the males are portrayed in a straight forward way—lots of writhing and crotch-grabbing, but no death masks, bruised eyes, anorexia or child exploitation hovering around the edges.
