10 Years of KMA. Kate Moss in conversation with Paul Flynn.
In 2016, Kate Moss founded her namesake agency as a means of keeping control of her own career. A decade on, it has become home to a generation of young models determined to navigate the industry in their own individual ways.
‘Ten years! It feels more like two. It’s exciting. In the big scheme of things, it isn’t that long, but really, it’s a landmark’
Up a winding stairway on the top-floor meeting room of Kate Moss Agency, there is a delightfully clear 270-degree view of Soho. London attends seamlessly to its business on the streets below. Soho still feels, emotionally at least, the place in which most of the metropolis’s pleasure, commerce, taste and Dionysian good humour converge. It is loosely to these values that KMA must remain true. If beauty is worth pursuing and imagery worth making, it is worth pursuing and making correctly. ‘We’re in the perfect location,’ muses Kate Moss, KMA boss, founder and talent, looking out onto W1 and, by virtue of its past and present, a sizeable portion of her own inimitable modelling story. Spotting it out of the corner of her eye, she points to Soho’s favourite coffee stop. ‘Having the view of Bar Italia, it feels like I’ve come full circle.’
When she was beginning her fashion life, still a Croydon schoolgirl, Kate Moss would pound these pavements for castings. Sometimes she’d sidle off from the prescribed day ahead, from another day in the lobby of a publishing company that wasn’t likely to employ her, to hang out in the Brewer Street flat of her favourite early photographer, the late, great Corinne Day. Corinne understood that cameras could frame not just an image but an essence too. This was the kind of imagery to which the young Kate Moss was drawn, by innocent instinct. ‘This was my stomping ground,’ she recalls, ‘from Corinne’s flat.’ Now, at KMA, she can guide her young talent to it, by experience. ‘We’d get a look on, walk down Soho.’ The talent signed to her agency have the same central vantage point from which to navigate their entry into the professional world. The circle is pleasingly complete.
‘When I started, agents wanted me to do catalogue [work] instead of The Face, because I’d get some cash for it. But I wanted to work with Corinne because I liked her – it was just hanging out with my mates. Thank God I did’
Talking about the agency, it quickly emerges that the set-up of KMA was nothing to do with Kate Moss wanting to turn from model to mogul. ‘No, absolutely not,’ she says, laughing and looking mock horrified at even the idea of it. ‘I am not business-minded like that
– I want to be more grounded. But I like working. I love working with people. I love doing shoots, being part of the agency.’ Building the business always came second to looking after the talent. The emergence of KMA as a potent force in the industry has been one of stealth. ‘I was worried about it turning into the same old fashion thing, the same old modelling agency. But we do things our own way.’
If KMA is conspicuously a Kate Moss enterprise, it is so by instinct rather than earnest design. On the back wall of the top-floor room there is a framed picture, identifiable by silhouette only, of Elizabeth Taylor caught in a kiss with Richard Burton. Beside the photograph, a pink neon sign proclaiming the old Roxy Music legend ‘love is the drug’. On the floor, a tiger-print rug Kate bought in New York. A lace curtain separates a kitchenette to our left. The room couldn’t really be anyone else’s. Due to a cultural osmosis that now spans almost four decades, a love affair between country and model, the fabulous idiosyncrasies of the Kate Moss palette have become one of the through-lines of late 20th and early 21st-century British taste. The top floor of the Kate Moss Agency is an office, yes. But it is also something more, in the same way you might say the agency namesake is a model, but also an emblem of a methodology in which Britain learned to be proud of itself on a world stage, for the right reasons. She is the cultural export we all want to claim a piece of.
It is a sun-drenched Monday afternoon at the start of 2026’s succession of summer heatwaves and Kate Moss Agency is preparing some discrete celebrations to honour 10 years of business. In many ways, these years haven’t felt like business at all, more a casual continuum of Soho, London and its gorgeous faces defining the look and feel of fashion and culture. A Kate Moss Agency face is not simply a commercial asset pinned to a wall, waiting to accrue numbers. It is a representation of what it is to be young and full of hope and beauty in a city that moves to the beat of its own self-selecting elite. It is a character who has something to say and wants to be heard.
‘Ten years,’ sighs Kate. ‘It feels more like two. It’s exciting. In the big scheme of things, it isn’t that long, but really, it’s a landmark.’ She remembers the beginnings of KMA, in September 2016, as the agency sprang out of a completely organic conversation with her booker. ‘The agency was kind of started on a whim. There wasn’t a plan to get other models. It was more that I didn’t want to go to another agency.’ Her contract had come up for renewal at her former agency. After talking with her long-time booker and great friend, Lucy Baxter, the two decided to have a go at looking after her career themselves, without any outside interest. Independence beckoned.
‘Kate just said, “Do you fancy doing something with me?”’ says Lucy Baxter. ‘It wasn’t something I’d really considered before, but it made sense.’ The early conversations about the agency were about how to achieve goals by stealth, not chasing power. ‘I said straight away that I don’t want a big agency, so the way it grew was organic. Small steps were perfect, really.’ This honoured the way she had learned to work with her priority client
in the first place. ‘Being Kate’s agent had taught me to play the longer game. The thing you learn from working with Kate is that less is sometimes more. We’re not just number-crunching here. We are more selective and have more
of a strategy.’
Things soon began to gently snowball. ‘We signed Louis Baines first,’ remembers Kate. Louis’s mum was a friend of Kate’s PA, Clemmie, meaning the first model was very much in the family. ‘She said, “Oh, my friend’s son is so gorgeous.” So he came to my house in Highgate and I cut his hair with a pair of kitchen scissors.’ She laughs, as Lucy shows her a picture on her phone from that day, saved for posterity, the impromptu makeover of KMA’s first client. ‘Aw, look,’ she says. ‘He’s got such gorgeous, dark, shiny hair. I thought, I need to fuck this up a bit.’ Her casual approach to finding talent continued. ‘Now it’s ended up that I’m working with many of the kids who I’ve known since they were babies, like family, and others who’ve joined the gang.’ Lucy noticed early that nothing felt forced. ‘We built slowly. Kate would be on a shoot with someone, they’d get on well, they didn’t have an agency and they would come on board.’
Joining KMA is never about having a parent agency to help shape young people’s identities. It was clear from the outset that model representation at KMA would not be about altering talent to find something camera-ready within them. ‘No, it’s about support,’ says Kate. ‘I don’t want to shape people. I think that’s what makes us different from other agencies. It’s about saying “you are you” and celebrating that.
I think there’s space for everybody if you want it, if you love fashion and you want to be part of the creative process.’ Much of the work done at
the agency happens before anybody goes on set as a model. ‘I wanted it to be different, to make sure the models feel protected. We chaperone them when they are starting out, so they aren’t taken advantage of. Because it still happens today. Just because there’s more information doesn’t mean it’s stopped.’
‘I don’t want to shape people. I think that’s what makes us different from other agencies. It’s about saying “you are you” and celebrating that’
The biggest surprise of perhaps all the signings to KMA for Kate Moss has been her own daughter, Lila. ‘I never thought Lila would do it,’ she says.
‘She never wanted to come on set.’
She says that when Lila did her first shoot, with Tim Walker for Dazed,
‘I had to sit downstairs in the basement. She wouldn’t let me watch her being photographed.’ And how did that feel? ‘Weird! But I understand, because I was shy and I didn’t want anybody watching me – let alone if my mum was a model.’ Kate remembers one early picture that Tim caught of her and Lila together, before any consideration of modelling entered the equation for her daughter. ‘There’s an amazing picture that Tim did, in my dressing room, when she’s in her school uniform. It’s one of my favourites. I’m in a geisha look and at my dressing table and she came home from school, hair down to her waist, and Tim’s like, “Sit there, love,” and she’s got her head on my shoulder. She’s still got braces – so cute.’
There was never a formal conversation with Lila, discussing how to start. ‘No, she just started doing bits and pieces and started enjoying it.’ Lila’s signing
to the agency feels as organic as the other talent. KMA was never set up to find the next big girl. It was about wrapping a protective arm around emerging talent who presented themselves, sometimes quite literally, on her doorstep. All Kate Moss wanted to do was to make sure they had a home that came with ample warning about the pitfalls of an industry that can promise the world. ‘It’s about “we’ll guide you”,’ says Kate of the agency. ‘“This magazine’s great. This photographer’s great.” And then they start working, learning about the industry together. They learn who the photographers are. They know their references before they go in. It’s important.’
Kate wants the young talent to be part of the process of making amazing imagery, not innocent bystanders in its composition. Once they learn to love photography, they understand the emotion behind pictures. ‘Exactly,’ she nods. ‘You understand why it happened. If somebody puts me in a red lip and my hair back and a heel, I would immediately go to Helmut Newton and
I would immediately sit in a certain way.’ It sort of goes without saying that the boss of the agency is one of the most incredible models of her age. What is so gratifying is hearing how much she wants to impart from her bank of hard-won knowledge on working a set, should the talent want to listen.
Operating an agency at this taste level means the talent is allowed to have some control over the way their career turns. If there is one thing that Kate Moss likes to teach all her young models, it is the ability to say no. ‘Definitely. I remember when I started agents wanting me to do catalogue [work] instead of The Face, because I’d get some cash for it. But I wanted to work with Corinne because I liked her. It was just hanging out with my mates. Thank God I did.’ This bank of information has now been passed down for 10 whole years to a new generation of models under Kate, Lucy and their staff’s charge. ‘You can’t
do everything,’ Kate continues. ‘It’s about understanding who you are.
I stopped going to castings I knew I wasn’t right for and sitting over there’ – she points to Bar Italia. ‘So this is what the agency does, sees everyone as an individual.’ KMA was not set up to breaking the mould, it was about adapting it and making it fit for modern purpose. ‘I tell them that you can always say no,’ she says. ‘I try to take on my own advice, but it can be difficult. But you can say no, and that’s what we support here.’
For this project, stylist Nilo Akbari borrowed the original headdress that Kate wore on her star-making cover shoot for The Face, shot by Corinne and styled by the late Melanie Ward, from Melanie’s father. Nilo is Melanie’s former assistant, and revisiting that July 1990 cover reminded her of the climate in which the model had begun shooting – ‘a time when fashion wasn’t a puzzle to be solved,’ says Nilo, ‘but an emotion to be honoured.’ She says that when she first began working with Melanie, ‘like every stylist before me, I wanted to ask a million questions about what shooting with Kate and Corinne was like in the early days.’ Melanie would bat back the questions with humility. ‘She’d just say, “We were just kids having fun.” It wasn’t about a theme or a thought, it was about gut instinct.’
Kate Moss says she doesn’t have grand plans for the agency for the next 10 years ahead, beyond ‘KMA still doing our thing, being inspired by the kids. In two years’ I will have been doing this for 40 years, which I find incredible.’ She laughs, then repeats the number, astonishing herself that this is the forthcoming benchmark. ‘Forty years. That sounds like I’m ancient.’
It sounds, in actual fact, like you simply smashed it, on every personal and professional level. ‘I realise how lucky I’ve been,’ she demures. ‘Both with my career and now with the agency. I have such a great team, we just get on with it and get the job done. I really appreciate every one of them.’