In 1991, Michel Haddi photographed Kate Moss in a quiet London studio for what was meant to be a GQ feature. The shoot wasn’t about glamour or elaborate styling; it was stripped down, shot on Polaroids that embraced imperfection and immediacy. Moss moved naturally in front of the camera, her expressions shifting between playful and reflective, never forced.
Having met Moss at the Cannes Film Festival while she was dating Hollywood actor Johnny Depp, Haddi compared her to “the mermaid of Copenhagen” – a nod to the famous bronze statue by Edvard Eriksen that sits in the harbour of Nyhavn, Copenhagen.
“I said: ‘Oh my God, this girl is like a dream,’… she doesn’t care about nothing and she’s so beautiful,” he said. “This was a girl that at the time was a big star then, but she said: ‘Your photo work of Johnny is so beautiful. I will love that if you could do some like that of me.’ I did some photographs of her there and then.”
The resulting images weren’t polished editorial shots but raw and unguarded moments. There was something magnetic about the way she seemed to float between being present and lost in her own world, an effortless quality that didn’t need staging.
In 2020, while clearing out a storage space in Venice Beach, Haddi unearthed a cache of Polaroids, contact sheets, and snapshots he had taken of Moss from his 1991 British GQ shoot. These were not formal editorial shots but intimate, spontaneous captures from early in her career.
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