Inside Kate Moss's 'painful' partnership with her 'best friend' who photographed her topless at 15 and made her 'snort like a pig' to get the perfect shot - as model admits she cried over the shoot

Together Kate Moss and photographer Corinne Day unintentionally heralded in a new era of fashion - heroin chic - when Day photographed the 15-year-old model for Face Magazine - including one now notorious topless snap.

It was a controversial association that didn't particularly please either party given its links to severe eating disorders, and it ultimately led the late London-born photographer, who died aged 45 in 2010 from a brain tumour, to leave the fashion world.

Kate, who considered Corinne a 'best friend' despite being 'tricky' to work with, similarly felt regret, largely due to the number of parents that would approach her in the streets and blame her for promoting eating disorders.

But despite the backlash, one element of the fateful shoot remained unquestioned - that Corinne, who was 12 years older than the model, triggered the start of Kate's career, with the images of a topless and bare-faced young Kate laughing on the English beach cemented in fashion forever.

However, this week the mother-of-one to daughter Lila revealed that all wasn't as it seemed in conversation with the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, Bella Freud, on her Fashion Neurosis podcast.

'I still, even after that shoot, I did cry a lot about taking my clothes off with her [Day],' Moss, 50, said. She added: 'I really didn't want to do it.'

In admitting she had reservations over the shoot, the 50-year-old supermodel has cast her friendship with Corinne in a new light after previously saying she felt 'good' about the work she'd made with the snapper. 

Corinne started her career in the world of fashion on the opposite end of the camera, working as a model in Italy during her teenage years.

In her spare time, she photographed her model flatmates, but unlike the made-up images typical at the time, she chose to stray away from performative glamour and towards unfiltered imagery.

'I loved seeing them with bags under their eyes because I thought they were even more beautiful,' she recalled reported Studio Nicholson. 'They had a life in them. It wasn't bland, or fake and covered in makeup,' Day added.

Acknowledging her fascination, Corinne approached fashion magazines to secure commissions, and in the spring of 1990, she visited Storm model agency to find the face of her next shoot.

She picked out a fresh-faced 15-year-old Kate Moss, who was not yet known in the industry - a choice that would change the course of her and Kate's life forever.

Corinne presented the polaroid to Phil Bicker, the art director of The Face - a prevalent art, fashion, and culture magazine at the time, originally published from 1990 to 2004, before a recent relaunch in 2019.

'I saw the same thing in Kate as Corinne saw, that she represented something very real: the opposite, in fact, of all the unreal high glamour of fashion,' Bicker recalled in conversation with the Guardian.

He continued: 'I sent Corinne and stylist, Melanie Ward, down to Camber Sands to do a shoot with her'.

It was a shoot that transformed the industry, with images of a young Kate bare faced laughing at the English beach cemented in fashion forever.

In the issue, dubbed 'The 3rd Summer of Love', Kate frolicked along the coastline topless, smoked cigarettes while bundled against a wall, and ran through the sand with a child-like glee across her face.

Corinne channelled her experience as a model into the images, refusing to touch them up, remarking that she had always hated being made 'into someone I wasn't' when modelling. 

Ironically, Bicker manufactured the 'natural' images. He told the Guardian: 'It looked natural and simple but it was carefully constructed to look like that. In fact, as I recall, I sent them down there two or three times until they got it right.'

Talking to Bella Freud, Kate revealed that in addition to the photographs being manufactured to appear candid, the glee on Kate's face was likely also performative. 

'At the time, it was me, Corinne, Drew Jarett, the hairdresser, and Dick Page, the make-up artist,' Kate said. 'So I would make Drew turn around because he was straight and I was, like, ''I'm not having him look at me''. I was really shy.

'I was 15 and topless in a magazine, and I was still in school. Luckily, The Face wasn't sold in Croydon, so I don't think anyone really saw it, but they heard about it.'

Moss appears naked in the photograph, protecting her modesty with her hands and a sun hat. In another, she is pictured topless wearing a feathered headdress.

'At a very young age, I started doing pictures topless and I was very conscious that I have a mole on my right t** and I hated it so much I would cry.' 

'I never wanted to be topless. I would cry and I had to get over it because the photographer [Day] would be, like, 'If you don't do this, I'm not going to book you for the next job', so I had to get over it.'

It's not the first time that Kate has opened up about the difficult shoot, with the tense circumstances exacerbated by her 'best friend' Corinne, who told her that she wouldn't shoot her unless she went topless.

Talking in a 2022 episode of BBC 4's Desert Island Discs, the mother-of-one recalled the 'painful' memories, adding that she 'cried a lot' during the shoot.

'That scrunched up nose that is on the cover, she would say, 'Snort like a pig' to get that picture.

'And I would be like, 'I don't want to snort like a pig' and she would be like, 'Snort like a pig, that's when it looks good'.'

Kate continued: 'I didn't want to take my top off. I was really, really self-conscious about my body and she would say, 'If you don't take your top off, I am not going to book you for Elle,' Kate said according to National World.

'It is quite difficult. It is painful because she was my best friend, and I really loved her – but she was a very tricky person to work with.

She concluded: 'But you know, the pictures are amazing, so she got what she wanted, and I suffered for them, but in the end they did me a world of good really. They did change my career.'

At the time, Kate's concerns went unnoticed, and the shoot led Corinne to secure a string of commissions for some of the most prestigious names in the industry - i-D, Gun and Penthouse, and the controversial Vogue shoot.

Taken in 1993 under British Vogue's 'Under-Exposure', Moss posed in her London flat in few clothes.

Outcry followed, spectators commented on Kate's body type, claiming she promoted an unrealistic body type and perpetuated unrealistic ideals or 'heroin chic'.

Describing the shoot with photographer Corinne Day, Ms Moss said: 'I just felt really good. The whole shoot, I felt really comfortable, I loved creating the images. You know, it wasn't glamorous. It was in my flat in London.'

'Our bedroom was like a bedsit. That's the kind of fashion I liked. It was much simpler.'

However, the supermodel recently revealed the torrent of abuse that followed. Kate, who became the poster girl for the trend in the Nineties, said that people would approach her in the street and accuse her of promoting ­eating disorders.

She told a Disney+ documentary: 'Parents would come up to me and say: 'My daughter's anorexic'. It was awful.

'I think because I was just skinny, and people weren't used to seeing skinny. But if I'd been more buxom, it wouldn't have been such a big deal. It's just that my body shape was different from the models before me.'

Reflecting on the backlash to the original photo, which is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in west London, fashion editor Catherine Kasterine told the documentary: 'The public were not ready. They were absolutely appalled.

'Immediately, the pictures were completely vilified and slammed. Perhaps we'd underestimated how that look had in our minds been quite normal.'

Vogue editor Dame Anna Wintour said: 'That look – very undernourished-looking model – made people uncomfortable.

'Many of us at Vogue worried about heroin chic or anorexia, all the things that are associated with that look. It got to such a fever pitch. I remember physically being in the White House when the Clinton administration took the issue on.'

Corinne's autobiography reads: 'These photographs upset her [Kate's] model agency and a whole bunch of other people in the press in England and America'.

She added: 'I thought these photographs were quite funny at the time. They certainly weren't the kind of photographs normally seen in Vogue. I had photographed Kate in her own flat.

'The photographs looked cheap and tacky everything that Vogue was not supposed to be.'

'I think the press took the photographs far too seriously reading a lot more into them than what was really there. Vogue stopped working with me after that.'

The debate on heroin chic led Corinne to withdraw from the fashion industry, instead choosing to work on documentary-style photography with her partner Mark Szaszy. 

It was in 1996 that Corinne's life took a turn after she collapsed in her New York apartment. She was rushed to hospital where medics found a brain tumour and performed an emergency operation.

Still, she insisted that Mark document the lead up to the operation via camera, arguing photography should show the things people don't normally get to see.

It is a series of images published in her photography book called Diary in 2000, alongside intimate images of her friends, with Corinne striving to present an accurate representation of youth culture at the time.

She made a recovery from the illness and continued work for Vogue and other high-fashion brands.

But in 2008, her tumour returned. Corinne's friends, including Kate, started a campaign called Save the Day to raise money for chemotherapy treatment in Arizona by selling Day's limited-edition prints.

She battled the illness for two years later until her passing in 2010 at the age of 45, with a statement on her website saying she passed 'peacefully at home, after a long illness.'

Tributes flooded in for Corinne, with the then-Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman saying: 'Corinne was a photographer of huge talent and integrity. 

'Her work for British Vogue was entirely original and will always be remembered. She could capture raw beauty like few others.'