Two of the bands on my end of year music recommendation list have songs which reference the Kate Moss quote “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”. Both are punk songs castigating diet culture (“Nothing Tastes As Good As It Feels” by the Lambrini Girls, and “Gok Wan” by Panic Shack). So this stood out to me because:
- Both are debut albums from bands which came out in 2025, so presumably the writers are in their 20s.
- I associate Kate Moss with “heroin chic” and modelling in the 1990s, when I was a teenager being influenced by her look and words. The actual quote seems to be from 2009 (later than I expected), but even still…
- Is Kate Moss still a poster child for diet culture in the 2020s?
I certainly didn’t come out of the 90s unscathed by the focus on extreme thinness, and the songs are both extremely good and speak to something deep within me. But I had somehow thought that times had changed, and the new “ideal” female physique was more curvy (as problematic as that concept is in the first place). It’s kind of depressing to hear that Kate Moss’s words continue to oppress the next generations, too.
A related thought: Kate Moss took a lot of flak for “causing” eating disorders in girls in the 90s, but she was victim as well as participant in the culture of the day. If you make your name and fortune from looking a certain way, of course you’re going to work very hard to maintain that look and the privileges it affords you. While people should ideally be careful of their words and how they can impact others, it was magazine editors, fashion stylists, and ultimately the public who put her in a position of influence. Maybe the take-away is that we created something so powerful in Kate-Moss-the-symbol that the impact reverberates down through the decades, regardless of the reality of Kate Moss the person.