Kate Moss stars in new campaign for Calvin Klein

Almost 25 years since she first made her name as the face of Calvin Klein, Kate Moss has returned to star in the brand’s fall 2016 campaign shot by Tyrone Lebon.

The 42-year-old supermodel joins a long list of talented stars from a range of creative industries, including fellow models Bella Hadid and Selah Marley, actresses Zoe Kravitz and Margot Robbie, singer Frank Ocean, American Vogue creative-director-at-large Grace Coddington, and a whole crowd of other social media “it” kids, rappers, musicians and cultural icons.

For Moss, it’s a moment of personal retrospection that also taps into the wider trend for 90s nostalgia that has swept the fashion and beauty world over recent months. Back in the early 1990s, Calvin Klein provided a young Moss with her first major career platform, launching a little-known face straight into the public spotlight. However, as the millennium rolled ever-closer, the relationship between the increasingly famous model and brand would become symbiotic. Each would come to define the other, with Moss lending her uniquely androgynous, nonchalant style to some of the decade’s most recognisable campaigns: CK Jeans and the brand’s fragrance, Obsession.

The latest Calvin Klein campaign pays homage to how far Moss has come, from the fresh-faced Kate of 20 years ago to the globally famous supermodel of today. Referring to her simply as “icon”, the tagline that matches her portrait reads: “I look back in #mycalvins.”

This time around, the relaxed jeans and minimalist set-up have been replaced in one image with a sultry black dress and metallic clutch bag. In another, she leans seductively towards the camera in a sleek blazer and white top. However, Moss still wears the same enigmatic expression of her younger days, lounging across a chair with the compelling, almost confrontational disinterest that has characterised so many of her campaigns over the years.

“She has this childlike, womanlike thing that I haven’t seen in a long time; it’s a new kind of beauty,” Klein himself said at the time – a kind of beauty that still feels new today, over two decades after it first appeared in those retro Calvin Klein campaigns.

Grace Cain