Photographer Responsible for "Heroin Chic" Dies

K. Moss by C. Day, 1990

Corinne Day, the photographer responsible for putting Kate Moss on the map, passed away a couple of weeks ago at age 48, from a cancerous brain tumor. In 1990, Ms. Day photographed a very young and innocent-looking teenage Kate Moss for British magazine, The Face. Clearly, Ms. Day was a talented photographer, and it's always sad to lose an artist before his or her time; but that said, Ms. Day started something that, while innocent at the time, ended up becoming very dark and destructive.

Ms. Day's naturalistic (not airbrushed) photos were labelled "gritty" and "grunge," and they were refreshing after the big hair, padded shoulders, and caked-on makeup that characterized fashion photography of the late 1980's.  But over the next few years, this gritty style got more and more extreme. Relatively healthy-looking models like Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell were replaced by gals like Moss who looked anorexic and/or addicted. "Heroin Chic" was born.

by Mario Sorrenti, 1993

In 1993, Ms. Day took another batch of photos of Ms. Moss for British Vogue. The photos came under fire because of how skinny Ms. Moss's appeared in them. People suspected an eating disorder or drug addiction. Adding fuel to the fire were photos taken of Kate Moss by Mario Sorrenti for Calvin Klein's Obsession for Men campaign. The images of an emaciated, wasted-looking Moss were EVERYWHERE: billboards, the sides of buses, every magazine you opened.

At the same time, grunge was taking over the music charts, heroin usage was on the rise, the economy sucked, and the crime rate was skyrocketing. It was a dark time, and though photos of some skinny British model seem insignificant in comparison, if you were a young woman at the time, you couldn't help but be negatively affected by them.

Thin was obviously in, and for me--a highly-impressionable young woman, recently out of college, just moved to Manhattan, trying to find a career (and a life)--it was powerful stuff. Girls in the city actually WERE that skinny, and they pouted and slouched and smoked their way around the Lower East Side looking gorgeous. My body shape naturally being closer to Kate Moss than Anna Nicole Smith, I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. Many fewer calories and lots of miles on the treadmill later, my body actually (scarily) resembled Ms. Moss's.

No, I'm not blaming Corinne Day for my journey to the dark side, but if she'd not taken those photos of Kate Moss back in 1990 that catapulted her to fame, who knows what the alternative would've been? All I'm saying is that in the early 90's, when conditions in the world were so dark and depressing, did we really need art and advertising to echo the times?