Kate Moss Goes ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ for W Magazine

By Erin Donnelly 02/09/12 at 06:10 PM

Kate Moss

Photos courtesy of W

Kate Moss on W

Oh, that Kate Moss. One day she's holding up boutiques and posing nude. The next she's looking every inch the blushing bride and doting on her nine-year-old daughter, Lila Grace. So ... which is it?

According to the March cover of W, it's both. Photographed by Steven Klein, the split shot sees the beguiling Brit playing both "Good Kate" and "Bad Kate" as novelist Will Self tries to boil down her morally ambiguous image.

"Kate Moss seems to have always been with us—and to have always been as she is," Self writes of the "eternal waif," whose angelic version sports an ivory Vera Wang silk lace gown and an Erdem habit capped with vintage lace.

"Yet the truth is that she’s 38, twice married [sic], and the mother of a 9-year-old girl. Her life has been a slalom through the toxicities of fame and success."

Sounds like fun! "Bad Kate," meanwhile, is a demonic-looking figure in a white Jil Sander cotton dress, lace Cornelia James gloves (one hand clutching a cross), and an elaborate Ashley Lloyd headpiece that offers a thorny take on a bridal veil.

Ruminating on Moss's "crushed carnation" lips and "cold reactor shutdown of her brown-to-black eyes," Self concludes that the model's charm lies in her refusal to slip neatly into one female archetype.

"In the past few years, with scandal heaped upon bathos, her once legendary media froideur—no interviews, no comments—has been fractured in ways so prosaic that far from shattering her visual image, it has left it mysteriously shellacked," he says.

"With each dull revelation, the glaze on those features becomes thicker and her essential self becomes even more enigmatic. She remains like a great silent-screen heroine who’s animated and reanimated and then reanimated again by the fizzing jolt of the kliegs. Long may it continue."

Hear hear!

For more Kate Moss, visit W online and pick up the March issue, on sale February 21.