Will fear of falling off the wagon stop Kate Moss rushing to aid of her drug addict little sister?
As Lottie falls into the same cocaine trap that she did at her age, concerned friends ask...
EVER since she was a teenager, it seems Lottie Moss has been destined to follow in the fashionable footsteps of big sister Kate. From being scouted as a schoolgirl by the legendary Sarah Doukas at the Storm model agency, to fronting a campaign for Calvin Klein, Lottie has mimicked her sibling. Now, sadly, she can add cocaine use and a stint in a rehab clinic to their list of shared experiences. For last week Lottie boldly stated to her 433,000 Instagram followers: ‘I’ve got a really bad addiction to coke.’
One commenter sniped in response: ‘Always copying your sister.’
Kate, now 48, spent years in the spotlight as part of the louche fashion world and Primrose Hill druggie set.
Most infamously, she was photographed next to lines of white powder in 2005, leading to ‘Cocaine Kate’ headlines. And in 1998, when she was 24, the age Lottie is now, she checked into London’s celebrity-friendly rehab centre The Priory after suffering what was termed ‘exhaustion’.
Many would assume that Kate would be keen to look after her Mini-Me sibling, perhaps even to be her ‘sober coach’ when she emerges from treatment. After all, who better to understand what she has been going through? And Lottie clearly has the Moss genes, with a sexual boldness that exceeds Kate’s even at her scandalous worst.
However, sources close to Lottie say that they expect Kate will keep her distance when her little sister emerges from the detox centre in Arizona she has retreated to. Supposedly Kate, who has the same father as Lottie but not the same mother, will want to stay clean herself.
With her own 19-year-old model daughter Lila to care for, Kate’s sobriety is vital, and she also fears the effects of association with a selfconfessed addict.
That said, the source adds: ‘Although they fell out when living together during the pandemic, when Kate took Lottie in, the pair continued to communicate and I believe that Kate was instrumental in getting Lottie into rehab a couple of weeks ago. Kate loves Lottie, of course, and will always try to help.’
KATE made numerous sacrifices over the past four years to try to stay clean of drugs and alcohol, including selling her £10m house in Highgate, North London, to move ‘out of reach of the temptations of the capital’ and into the Cotswolds. There, she claims to have fallen in love with the countryside, saying her garden is the ‘most beautiful thing I have ever owned’. She has even learned how to make marmalade.
It’s also a safe haven for Lila. That the teenager should stay on the straight and narrow and socialise with commercially useful friends such as designers Kim Jones and Marc Jacobs, is another priority.
‘Would Lottie be a good influence on anyone?’ asks a source. ‘She is a lovely, fun person to be around but I don’t think she’s anyone’s idea of a good role model.’
Indeed, the 24-year-old’s most recent Instagram post, on Thursday – while, it is believed, still in rehab, shows her lying half-naked on a sofa in Los Angeles in a pornographic pose. She’s also used social media to joke about drugs, saying in one post, which appeared to be deliberately misspelled to avoid TikTok’s censors: ‘When everyone’s glamourising droog-taking but you’re literally in r3h4b.’
Meanwhile, Kate’s commitment to staying sober is such that she has allowed some relationships with her old party crowd to remain at arm’s length.
There is no suggestion that such friends are involved in drugs but Kate no longer socialises with designer Stella McCartney and singer Rita Ora, who used to call Kate ‘Wifey’. Nor is DJ Nick Grimshaw as close as he used to be.
The new Kate crew include DJ Fat Tony and hairdresser James Brown, both sober, plus Meg Mathews (ex-wife of Oasis’s Noel Gallagher) who has come out from troubles with addiction, and old friend Sadie Frost who has been vocal about how much better life has been since she gave up alcohol.
And, perhaps most importantly, Kate feels she needs to stay sober to keep her romance with Count Nikolai von Bismarck on track.
He went into rehab himself in 2017, after two years with Kate, spending nearly three months at a residential facility in America paid for by his parents. The following year, Kate realised that she needed to be sober, too, if their relationship was to endure.
‘It must be better for them not to be around anyone who is boozing or using drugs,’ says the source. ‘There’s an axiom in addiction circles which runs: Change your players, change your playground.
‘Kate Moss has followed this to the letter, determined to make her sobriety stick.’
Such steadfastness contrasts with the behaviour of Lottie, who gives every impression of regarding rehab as a joke.
She has posted online footage of her dancing to the theme from the TV show Euphoria and wisecracked: ‘I think I took euphoria too literally u guys.’
She has continued to plug her Only Fans account (widely regarded as a portal for wannabe porn stars),
in which she strips off for money. She posted a mocked-up picture of Kanye West holding a sign which said: ‘Subscribe to Lottie’s Only Fans’ while in rehab. Another post on Instagram last week read: ‘I’m a slut for myself. Why am I so hot?’ A source says: ‘It took Kate several goes to get on to the wagon. She knows that Lottie must make her own decision to get on board her own detox wagon.’
Lottie is the daughter of Kate’s father, travel agent Peter Moss, and his second wife, Norwegian Inger Solnordal, and was raised in Haywards Heath, West Sussex. The family business is a shop selling vintage clothes, jewellery, homeware and food.
There was an inevitability that she would become a model, having been a beautiful bridesmaid, aged 13, at Kate’s wedding to musician Jamie Hince. She was said to have looked like an angel from a Botticelli painting with a garland of wild flowers in her hair.
The following week she had a meeting with Storm Model Management and was told: ‘Where have you been hiding?’
Her first photoshoot was published in Teen Vogue, and she had her first full editorial not long afterwards in Dazed & Confused, a magazine which was co-founded by Kate’s ex, Jefferson Hack.
She juggled revising for her A-level exams with a red-carpet appearance at the Cannes film festival. It was at a previous Cannes,
in 1998, that a 24-year-old Kate was famously photographed in a black feathered dress alongside her then lover Johnny Depp.
In a diary for Vogue, Lottie wrote: ‘Sometimes I feel like I live in two worlds. One minute I’m in a Dior suite in Cannes and then the next I’m in a classroom in Sussex.’
She decided on a modelling career, telling an interviewer: ‘My sister and I are two different people and she is on her path and I am on my own. It kind of runs in the family. Kate was a massive part of why I started.’
Tellingly, she added: ‘It’s hard when your sister is Kate Moss and being compared to her. I had a great time modelling but everything was handed to me. I never felt like I worked for anything.’
The first few years of Lottie’s career were very blue chip, with campaigns for Bulgari and Valentino. But that faded and she began to develop a reputation for a busy social life.
On one pre-pandemic night out at the uber-chic Chiltern Firehouse restaurant in London she lost her bag and her passport while busy ‘snogging’ an admirer. There was a fling with Brooklyn Beckham – whose parents were not amused – and another dalliance with tattooed rapper Milkavelli.
Now, her soulmate is the female singer Blithe Saxon, who went to London’s Sylvia Young theatre school.
She posted a picture of them together in swimsuits last week, captioning it: ‘My wife and valentine forever – ride or die baby! I’ve never loved anyone like I love you! My true soulmate.’
Lottie started posting explicit snaps on the subscription website Glow last year and has since migrated to Only Fans.
She says she’s been making more than £70,000 a month selling her sometimes fully nude pictures for £24 and boasts: ‘I’m a very sexual person. I’m just taking fun pictures you’d send to your boyfriend.
‘It’s fine, it’s harmless, it’s not hurting anyone. It’s so good.’
Her sister was not happy. A source told the New York Post: ‘There have been times when Kate has felt
It must be better for them not be around anyone boozing or taking drugs
Kate has had her head in her hands about what Lottie is doing
straight-up mortified. She has had her head in her hands about Lottie and what she is doing with her career.’
Defiantly, Lottie told L’Official magazine: ‘Why should I be made to feel [ashamed] because I’m doing something I enjoy?
‘Everyone always says “be yourself and do what you love” until it’s something that isn’t considered “reputable” or to their standard of what is considered OK.
‘I am who I am and I do what I want, whether that is modelling or anything else. The success of my sister does not affect me in my choices.’
It is surely significant, however, that Lottie is not among the rising ‘superstars’ on the books of Kate’s modelling agency, and instead remains listed with Storm.
In the early days of lockdown, Kate invited Lottie to stay with her in the Cotswolds, but reports suggest that there was a ‘massive argument’.
‘Kate was frustrated because Lottie kept on drinking a lot and posting sexually provocative stuff on Insta all the time,’ said a source.
‘It isn’t easy for Kate to be around people who are drinking. Lottie left in a foul mood and I’m told she left two bottles of Kate’s favourite wine in the fridge which was interpreted as a “f*** you” gesture.’
Maybe Lottie was thinking of this when she regretfully wrote in April 2020: ‘My struggles have caused me to act out of character. Ultimately, I was becoming a person I didn’t really like, which is why I numbed myself with substances and put myself down through neglect of my mental and general health.
‘Going down that road made it very hard for me to get out. I was surrounding myself with people who were in a similar mental state and that was not helping.’
Earlier this year, though, she appeared online in tears after a ‘friend’ betrayed her by posting her naked pictures and her phone number online.
Now she’s in rehab, her father says she’s coping ‘just fine’.
Whatever comes next, Lottie Moss will always have big sister Kate’s enduring support – but in the short term, at least, this looks likely to be at a distance.