Kate Moss turned 40 on Thursday. For more than half that time, she has - with great style, impressive tact and good taste - successfully sold her clothed and naked body to an appreciative fashion business and an admiring public. In the frivolous world she inhabits, where a season is an eternity, her endurance has been remarkable.
But 40 is a critical threshold in anyone's life. Victor Hugo said it marked "the old age of youth". So what do we make of her as she approaches middle age?
Kate, for all her epic visibility, is low-temperature, inscrutable. Her allure is magnified by her high-profile silence. And that is part of the appeal. Moss's personality is as cleverly protected as her body image is adroitly projected. She offers the spectacle of absolute thinness and what to do with it. Moss almost never gives interviews, but one of her few collected remarks is memorable. Nothing, she once said, tastes as good as skinny feels.
"Icon" is an abused term, but the prominence and power of Kate Moss's image allows its legitimate use. An icon was a religious stereotype, often mass-produced, but nonetheless conveying real meaning to a devoted congregation in search of succour and inspiration. We are that congregation. Kate Moss, via Calvin Klein and other leaders of the religion that is fashion, tells us what an elegant woman looks like. And to the men, that emotionless stare simultaneously says: "Not in a million years, sunshine."
Future historians will surely note that Moss came to prominence in the late '80s at a time when "design" evolved from being a technical conversation in a drawing office, or the province of a few tastemakers, to a fashionable topic. It's significant that she comes from subtopian Croydon, which Simon Jenkins described as an "off-centre office location ... awful to behold". I'll say one thing about lower-middle England, though - it's a very good launch pad.