IS THAT KATE MOSS!
When people look at Denise’s face, she thinks they’re looking at her scars from an horrific car crash. In fact they’re thinking:
AS A young girl, Denise Ohnona never believed for a moment she was beautiful, reserving particular distaste for her distinctive almondshaped eyes.
‘It is the one feature that I really used to cry about as a kid, because I thought the fact they were wide apart was so ugly,’ she recalls. ‘I remember asking Mum why my sister was the pretty one.’
Little could she have known that it would be those eyes — not to mention cheekbones that could slice through a T-bone steak — that would ultimately lead to her being compared to one of the most beautiful women in the world.
Denise may be a whole three inches shorter and seven years younger than (who else?) Kate Moss, but the 43-year-old motherof-two looks so uncannily like the supermodel that when she strutted down a catwalk during Paris Fashion Week last week — harking back to Kate’s indie days in an oversized leather jacket and heavy kohl-rimmed eyes — everyone thought she was the real deal.
‘After the show there were paparazzi, all these people calling me Kate, telling me they loved me and asking for pictures,’ she says. ‘People actually thought I was the real Kate, which was crazy.’
Not that crazy when you see the results of today’s exclusive photoshoot for the Mail, in which Denise gamely models some of Kate’s most iconic looks, from Saint Laurent sheer tights teamed with a black fluffy coat to the famous green sequinned dress she wore while filming a cameo for the 2016 movie Absolutely Fabulous. Such is her resemblance to the world-famous model that even though I know I am in the presence of a lookalike, I still do a double-take every time she steps out of the dressing room.
That is, until she starts chatting. For while Kate may have grown up in suburban Croydon, ‘Fake Kate’, as she’s been dubbed, hails from Liverpool and still has the accent (and the no-nonsense approach) to prove it.
She’s clothed in high street fashion, not haute couture, and during our interview tucks into a decidedly un- supermodel-like fried chicken sandwich with chips on the side — although she insists it’s an aberration as she has to work hard to keep her seven-and-a-half-stone figure.
‘This is a treat,’ confides Denise, who now lives in Ormskirk, Lancashire. ‘Being Kate is a full-time job. I weight-train four days a week, I do intermittent fasting and I have Botox, but nothing else. I use a microcurrent device on my skin, which is like a gym for your face.’
THE bone structure is certainly all hers — courtesy of her English mother and Moroccan father — and meant that even as a young teen comparisons were drawn to the waifish Moss.
‘I didn’t once think I was beautiful though,’ she says. ‘I still don’t.’
But her mother thought she was a looker, and after consulting with a modelling agency when she was 17, Denise was told she could get work, although her lack of height — she’s 5ft 4in to Kate’s 5ft 7in — meant she would be restricted to catalogue rather than catwalk.
‘Then, not long after that,’ she says, ‘I smashed through a windscreen, so I never got to do it.’
It’s a statement delivered with a matter-of-fact bluntness that does little to reflect the life- changing horror to which it refers.
Then 18 and working in a branch of Next, Denise had been picked up from work by her boyfriend. Minutes later, the car rounded a corner and hit a bus.
Denise wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and was propelled through the windscreen, her face taking the brunt of the impact. ‘Half my face was sliced off — it was like a river of jelly,’ she recalls. ‘I was conscious throughout, and I remember lying in the gutter thinking, “I don’t want to die… please don’t let me die.” ’
DENISE was taken to the Royal Liverpool Hospital where she was operated on by a doctor who was later revealed to be untrained in plastic surgery, meaning his work triggered surplus collagen production and thick scarring.
Denise says: ‘I remember the first time I got up out of bed, after someone had taken all the bandages off, and I looked in the mirror. I just fell on the floor. It wasn’t even my face any more.’
She starts to weep as she remembers the impact it had on her mother Linda, who still lives around the corner. ‘The day before the accident, I’d bought a new coat and hat — I didn’t have a lot of money, so it was a big deal — and Mum said, “Oh, Denise, you look so beautiful.” Then she had to see my face split open.
‘She had a breakdown after that. She couldn’t get over seeing everything I was going through. And now that I’m a mum I understand, because I don’t think I could cope seeing my kids go through that.’
The accident ravaged Denise’s physical and mental health. She developed an ulcer and lost so much weight she plummeted to five-and-a-half stone, while corrective procedures failed to completely eliminate the raised scars.
She remembers being in a supermarket, in the early days after the accident, and a child bursting into tears when he looked at her.
‘It wasn’t the kid’s fault — he just saw a scary face,’ she says.
Teenagers shouted ‘Scarface’ at her in the street and the stress led to a mental breakdown, the effects of which linger to this day.
She says: ‘Even before the accident I had no confidence — I worried too much about what people thought.
Then afterwards I had years of wasting my life away because I was scared of everything. I was scared of what people thought.’ Even today, when her scars are — to my mind — barely visible, Denise remains hugely self-conscious.
‘When I’m in the light, some people don’t even notice, but I know they’re there,’ she says. ‘One side of my face is uneven.’
When people are taking sideways glances, wondering if she is Kate Moss, her instinct is still to think they are pointing out her flaws.
‘I think they’re looking at the scars on my face,’ she says. ‘It’s why I could never cope with actually being Kate Moss — cameras pointing at you from every angle, everyone dissecting everything about the way you look. Even this week there were people commenting online that you could see scars on my face. It’s why I don’t like unexpected photos, because I’m just conscious about it.’
AfTEr a stint working on the docks in Liverpool, Denise met her first husband and moved to the U.S. for five years, where they both worked in telecoms. Her eldest daughter Elise, now 13, was born there, and she recalls the odd occasions she was told of her resemblance to Kate Moss by curious Americans. ‘I was in a different mindset, with a young baby,’ she says. ‘It didn’t really register.’
When her marriage broke down she returned to England in 2012 and, disheartened by divorce, hit the gym and started ‘taking care of myself’.
‘I started getting more “you look like Kate Moss” again, but I didn’t do it for that. I was trying to rebuild my life.’
Within two years she’d met her current partner rob, a music producer with whom she has a daughter, Anais, now eight.
Then unbeknown to her, someone sent a photo of her on a night out with a friend to a lookalike agency, and the bookings started coming in. ‘It was still low key — appearances for small businesses, that sort of thing,’ she says.
That is, until October 2019, when she was asked to model on a Paris catwalk alongside a procession of other lookalikes for the achingly cool fashion house Vetements.
‘I was so stressed, I just didn’t want to go. I’m not actually a model, and for me to step into that role just felt so exposing,’ she says. ‘But then rob said I was mad, and I had to do it.’
The subsequent pictures of Denise, complete with tousled dirty blonde hair and gold dress channelling ‘1990s Kate’, went
viral, with many saying she had even nailed the model’s distinctive swaying walk.
‘Which is funny as I really am just walking, and actually one thing I struggle with is posture,’ she says. ‘But it did blow up and I was getting lots of attention.
‘Then, within weeks, lockdown happened and everything got cancelled. I thought it was a sign, and I started gardening, growing food. I did the odd Kate thing as a favour, but that was all.’
That might have been that for ‘Fake Kate’, until last autumn when David Dodd, a photographer and content creator friend who works under the name ‘ Doddywood’, suggested it was time that she made a comeback.
More for fun than anything else, the two collaborated on a series of jokey posts under the Instagram handle ‘ iamnotkatemoss’, which now has more than 77,000 followers. ‘I was eating at McDonald’s, coming out of Primark, taking the trash out — you know, the things that Kate wouldn’t be doing,’ she laughs.
In December, when Chanel took over a street in Manchester’s Northern Quarter for a catwalk show attracting celebrities from around the world, Denise was photographed emerging from a branch of Aldi complete with a 65p bag-for-life in a prank that fooled picture editors and journalists worldwide. ‘I did enjoy that one,’ she admits.
Then came last week’s catwalk appearance for independent French fashion brand Marine Serre, which also had people fooled. Alas, it also apparently left her famous doppelganger unimpressed.
‘Kate isn’t embracing the joke,’ a fashion source said last week. ‘She finds it all quite unflattering. She just doesn’t like it.’
It’s not a great surprise to Denise, who has never met her famous alter
ego but confides that she has long worried she might think she’s not ‘good enough’ to represent her.
‘I don’t think we’re identical anyway, me and Kate,’ she says. ‘I think Kate’s way more beautiful, she’s unique, but I think the resemblance is enough, that’s all.’
She believes she owes her a debt of gratitude as, although she still feels self- conscious about her appearance, ‘ being Kate’ has allowed her to shed some of her old fears. ‘I was so scared all the time, scared of life really, and now I have done things the old me wouldn’t have dreamed of.’
She’S grateful, too, that the newly zen Moss’s hard-partying days are behind her. Once a famous hedonist, Kate, now 50, has embraced a teetotal life of early nights, meditation and wild swimming — which chimes with Denise now she’s in her 40s.
‘As you get older you realise the party can’t keep going, that you can’t take life for granted and you want to take better care of yourself,’ she says. ‘I’ve quit drinking, I go to bed really early with my camomile tea. Ageing is a privilege, but I still want to be healthy for when grandkids come along.’
Besides, the trauma she experienced as an 18-year- old means ‘Ormskirk Kate’ refuses to take anything about her dabble in celebrity waters too seriously, insisting she still views herself as a stay-at-home mum with a fun sideline. ‘I know that one day you can be living your life and it can change in a heartbeat,’ she says.
‘And this is why I would say to people: if you’re beautiful on the outside, make sure you’ve got something on the inside, because beauty can be taken away in an instant.
‘I don’t think I’m that beautiful anyway, but looks aren’t for ever. I appreciate people who like the person that I am rather than how I look.’