Kate's Pearls of Wisdom

My newspaper devoted an entire page to the shocking news that Kate Moss finds vanity more gratifying than eating. Quelle surprise! Who would have thought it of a model brainwashed for years by the mantra, "If you don't keep thin, you don't get work"? Simple as that. Did anyone actually expect her to advocate steak and kidney pudding followed by tiramisu as a way for young women to have fun?

So, has Kate — the little cockney sparrow we all loved because she was beautiful and seemed to be blessedly free of opinions on anything — turned into the new Cruella de Ville of high fashion, the one who speaks the unspeakable? Do all those fans who could forgive her the drugs, the fags and spilling out of nightclubs at three in the morning, giving a very good imitation of being totally wasted — just like thousands of other cool young Saturday night urbanites — see her as the enemy, as my very-middle-class newspaper seems to?

I don't think so.

What Kate has done, either naively or with clever pre-Christmas cunning (after all, she does know people who need to sell a lot of fashion clothes this season), is let the world know what most of us have divined: the look is all. As it always has been in the fashion world. Kate's comment is nothing more than an update of the slogan attributed to the Duchess of Windsor that a fashionable woman can never be too thin or too rich — although with high-street sales booming (with a lot of help from Kate) at least the second point is no longer so relevant.

And, of course, it isn't just Kate who is guilty. Most of us would like to be thinner if only we could learn to be obsessive over our looks, as models must be. But I guess that for most of us the mantra for contentment is "You can never be too complacent or lazy".

Wonder why the Duchess didn't come up with that one?