The Observer: Kate Moss’s very public scrap with Pete Doherty – which took place apres the Paris couture shows on a London-bound Eurostar train on Wednesday night – was much more than a mere row. It was a fashion statement.
photo courtesy of Sakura
Moss and Doherty are riding the vanguard of skank chic. It’s a look and a lifestyle – a trashy subversion of normal notions of glamour and civilised celebrity behaviour – which embraces matted hair, a residual air of grubbiness and the kind of roller-coaster, booze-and-drug-addled passion that can inspire physical fights in speeding trains. Moss and Doherty weren’t just fighting. They were locked in a spontaneous and terribly fashionable performance-art moment.
‘Skank chic as a style statement is the ultimate in anti-glamour and anti-pretty, isn’t it?’ says Harriet Quick, fashion features editor of Vogue. ‘Kate Moss, she’s the living incarnation of course, looking mud-splattered but impossibly glamorous against all the odds in Glastonbury. It’s those dirty-grey drain-pipe jeans that look filthy even if they’re not. It’s the antithesis of flawless plastic Hollywood.’
