Pulling up to Kate Moss’s Oxfordshire home a few hours outside of London, you’re welcomed by the kind of rock-and-roll-bohème vestiges you’d expect from the reigning queen of Glastonbury (20 years running). Untamed English roses grow along the stables and stone outhouses that dot the property, and there’s a silver 1970s Rolls-Royce Shadow II parked in the driveway. As I step over the threshold, I am greeted by two life-size skeletons arranged in a compromising position on the stone floor.
Moss meets me at the door in a vintage caped-and-fringed Missoni caftan, cadmium-red Venetian slippers peeking out from under the hem, before leading me from the foyer to her living room and collapsing on a squishy dust-pink sofa. Fresh from a detox retreat in Turkey, her unapologetic suntan is intensified by antique turquoise jewelry and that bright, crooked smile. She looks well—very well indeed.
“I just don’t feel the need to get trashed now,” Moss says with a glimmer of mischief when I ask what’s behind the impressive 180 from a woman who once personified the cardinal sins of today’s pious wellness establishment. Her own addition to the self-care juggernaut, Cosmoss—a six-piece collection of realistic rituals two and a half years in the making—is deeply connected to this specific setting, Moss explains: Meetings with her development team took place at her farmhouse kitchen table and were accompanied by stimulatory garden walks, picking up rosemary and bay leaves as the moss-green-and-gold packaging details were finalized.
“So many herbal teas taste like pond water,” she says in good humor, pouring Dawn, a hibiscus flower blend, into a set of Moroccan glasses. The invigorating pink tisane is delicious, with accents of anti-inflammatory nettle and a little thyme to stimulate the immune system and soothe the soul. Its bedtime counterpart, Dusk, is the intense blue of butterfly pea (“It’s the color of the sky here at about seven o’clock,” insists Moss), pepped up with a hit of fennel for digestion. “Cosmoss celebrates my vulnerabilities and strengths,” she says, at once ethereal and everywoman. “Resilience is a great word, too.”
But let’s rewind a bit: Tea alone can’t impart the kind of transcendent confidence that Moss, now 48, radiated at this year’s Met Gala, and she is the first to admit as much. “I just wanted to be grown up,” she says, of some serious life changes she’s been making over the last decade, inspired in part by her “very well-behaved, very studious” daughter, Lila, 19, who is headed to Parsons School of Design in New York this fall. Moss now does an Ashtanga flow three times a week, and hosts sound and gong baths in her living room with the lady from the local health food shop. It may sound hippy-dippy, but when she describes the therapeutic sessions—seated on cushions alongside a large Buddha sculpture placed in front of the Jamb marble fireplace—the idea of looking out at Moss’s Francis Bacon and Damien Hirst paintings as the ambient noise from singing bowls and chimes fills the room strikes me as rather calming. It’s all a far cry from the scrutiny of those early modeling years, which were spent in a Marlboro Light haze and without much thought about what it meant to be healthy. (“There was such a lack of care,” Moss recalls. “You were a child, and they’d just throw you a dirty old croissant backstage at shows.”)
Her first detox trip to Turkey 10 years ago was enlightening. “Nobody taught me that if you don’t eat vegetables you are still going to be hungry, because you’re not getting proper nutrition,” she says, confidently delivering a speedy lunch of steamed spinach, fish, and brown rice. These, and other practical skills for healthy living, were picked up at the picturesque Akra Barut resort in Antalya, where the property’s LifeCo practitioners have educated Moss on how to incorporate mindfulness into all facets of her life. Moss’s go-to program is the Master Detox, a weeklong cleanse created by London-based nutritional coach and best-selling author Amanda Hamilton: no solid food, only juices, to give the digestive system a break. On her most recent visit, Moss traveled with five girlfriends. “We were getting up at 6 a.m. to go swimming in the sea, juicing, and just getting healthy,” she says. An introduction on her 44th birthday to the body- and mind-strengthening power of yoga, courtesy of Sadie Frost’s favorite French instructor, has been equally transformative; but it is Victoria Young—the London-based homeopath introduced to Moss by the makeup artist Charlotte Tilbury and Moss’s longtime boyfriend, Nikolai von Bismarck—whose input has become central to both her daily life and her debut brand.
A mix of Transcendental Meditation and apps such as Calm and Insight Timer is now the axis of Moss’s day: “Today I wanted to be more present; yesterday, I was peace and courage,” she shares of the extra dose of inner strength required for the live-streamed testimony she had just delivered—a subtle reminder for anyone (everyone) who was watching the torrid court proceedings between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard that Moss has always been, since she was a freckled, fawn-like teen, an arbiter of authenticity. “I was glad I did it. Had to be done,” she says in a measured tone, motioning knowingly to a spartan desk, the pertinent spot where she gave her statement remotely—and from where the world became obsessed all over again with her unrivaled cheekbones, which appeared aglow, even on a Zoom screen.
That radiance could be attributed to the Moss extract, a complex of three wild Icelandic plants used in the face cream and cleanser that she has developed with Young. “I’m obsessed with washing my face,” Moss says, likely a hangover from the many years she has spent in the makeup chair. The foaming cleanser has a touch of detoxifying pink clay and bakuchiol—which, she proudly explains, is a plant-based alternative to retinol. Another notable ingredient: CBD, the reformed ’90s party girl’s beauty elixir of choice these days. “I use it to take the edge off instead of having a glass of wine. I find it really calming,” she says, stroking the contented papillon on the folds of her caftan. “And they have dog CBD, did you know?” she adds, dropping some of her Golden Nectar, a cell-rejuvenating antioxidant oil, onto her tongue.
The collection is fully vegan, which Moss is not, but she’s a “conscious eater,” she shares later, sitting down to an artichoke soup and buttery toast with Young and her team as Lila joins them. Calm and poised, the younger Moss floats into the kitchen in heavy combat boots and a long black floral chiffon skirt, the outline of her diabetes monitor visible through the tissue-like fabric. Lila, who had been shot by Vogue the day before, shares her mother’s love of vintage and tea supping, and they commune together warmly, chatting about their plans to see the ABBA holograms that night, and the merit of the rumors about Fleetwood Mac reuniting at Glastonbury, which sadly did not come to fruition.
“It’s that balance of all of these beautiful parts of [Kate] at once,” Young suggests of the appeal of Cosmoss, which launches tomorrow at cosmossbykatemoss.com and at select retailers across Europe. “And the not-so-beautiful parts,” Moss interjects, a nod to her personal wellness approach that is far from monastic: mid-chat, she lights a cigarette with such feline stealth I thought I had imagined it—until she reached for a second. “I think this is one of the most personal things she has ever done; no outside influences, it came from this house, which is her sacred place,” adds creative consultant and Moss’s longtime hairstylist James Brown, who came to visit Oxfordshire six weeks before COVID hit, and has been living with Moss, Lila, and von Bismarck ever since.
As an integral part of this intimate focus group, Brown was an early recipient of the face cream as he had a “soul-destroying” skin inflammation that Moss was determined to help cure, in spite of Brown’s initial reluctance to play guinea pig. A sibling-like tussle ensued, first over applying it, and then, just 24 hours later, over who got ownership over the sole sample. Cosmoss has evolved “exactly as Kate wanted it,” continues Brown, offering up his breakfast-table vantage point: “She loves that garden as much as a Galliano bias-cut slip dress!”
During a ramble through the peonies, poppies, and allium, which are dotted with tulips (an annual gift from the hair stylist Sam McKnight) and some “very ’80s” pink carnations (Santa Maria Novella stopped producing carnation oil, so Moss is cultivating her own), Moss tells me about her broader beauty ambitions as we stop off at a precariously placed vardo. The decorative wooden wagon, a gift for Lila’s 15th birthday, is regularly commandeered as a hideout by Moss, and she curls up inside, revealing her endgame with otherworldly assertion: “I want to have my own spa!” It’s a compelling idea, thanks in no small part to an almost evangelical desire to spread this message of compassionate self-care. “I thought: I just love this—and I want to tell people,” Moss says of the healing herbs, meditation, and other practices prescribed by Young.
The two women work almost symbiotically, and before I head back to London, I am quickly spritzed with their “aura fragrance,” called Sacred Mist. Young encourages me to actualize as I breathe in the heady blend of oak moss, cedar wood, and tonka. “We’re still having fun, but it’s just a different fun,” Moss insists, producing a large crystal singing bowl in a noble attempt to teach me how to use the meditation tool. I am not sure it activated my heart chakra, but I felt the good vibrations.
Cosmoss by Kate Moss is available from September 1 at www.cosmossbykatemoss.com.