Can you please settle this burning issue: is Cara Delevingne the new Kate Moss?

Zoe, by email

Far be it for me to disagree with – at current count – 10,796,853,231 Polly Filla magazine features (as well as 10,796,853,231,992 blogs), but I'm going to make bold here and answer no, no she is not.

This statement is not intended as a diss of either Ms Delevingne or Ms Moss. In fact, it is very much a compliment to both of them, but we'll get to the specific nature of this compliment in a tick. First, let's deal with idea of anyone, or anything, being "the new" something.

The determination of the fashion, celebrity and magazine industries to dub Delevingne "the new Kate" reveals precisely how they misunderstand what makes something or someone exciting, or even just famous, in the first place.

The reason Kate Moss is still the old, the new and indeed the current Kate Moss is because there has never been a model like her before. For such a small isle, Britain has birthed an outsized number of successful models, from Twiggy to Penelope Tree to Jean Shrimpton to Naomi Campbell to Stella Tennant. But none of them were anything like Moss, in looks or, most of all, attitude. Let me repeat that, because this issue seems to confuse people: it is because she was like no one before her that she became famous.

It is astonishing how many people, heck, how many industries forget the importance of originality when it comes to being a hit. Take Hollywood film studios, for example, who seem to think that the lesson to take from the success of, say, an excitingly original movie about the end of the world is to knock out 22 more movies about the end of the world, in the belief that people love the apocalypse as opposed to originality.

The publishing industry is notoriously prone to this misconception, too, churning out books with the same plot and tone as a book that enjoyed success two years before or, even more pathetically, giving a book a cover that looks astonishingly similar to one that cloaked a blockbuster book several years ago. Do marketing folk think people enter a bookshop and go: "Oh look! There's Zadie Smith's book from three years ago which I already own. I'll buy it again! Oh, wait – it's another book entirely that looks like Smith's. Well, seeing as I already have it in my hands, I'll buy this one, too."

Have these marketing people ever met a human? Are they even human themselves? While one can never underestimate the taste of the public, one should also not underestimate the importance of novelty.

Put it this way: remember all those cod erotica books that were touted as the new Fifty Shades last year? Ever heard of them again? The answer, dear readers, is no, of course you haven't. Because while one sub-Mills & Boon book is too many for some of us, two is surplus for everyone.

Returning to the whole "Cara is the new Kate" malarkey, clearly magazines don't mean this literally, seeing as Kate Moss is still very much around.

What they really mean is that they hope she will achieve the kind of mass appeal Moss has done, and therefore help them sell more magazines. But despite the press's best attempts to make this happen, I'm personally not convinced they will succeed. For a start, Delevingne has repeatedly said that she isn't all that interested in modelling, a comment one is free to take as reflecting well on the young lady.

Second, as a model, she is nothing like Moss. The reason Moss has lasted so unusually long in the business is because is she has the most extraordinarily mutable face. Look at five fashion shoots of Moss and she will look almost unrecognisably different. Delevingne, while clearly very beautiful, always looks like herself, eyebrows and all, and while this is no bad thing (in fact, I find it a rather sweet thing), it does mean that her value as a model will be somewhat limited.

Designers and fashion editors love to work with Moss because she understands the image they're trying to create and she can then enhance it. When I see a fashion shoot with Delevingne, by contrast, whether she's modelling skater wear or ballgowns, I never think: "Wow, look at those clothes." I think: "Oh look, it's that Cara again." Again, this is not a criticism of Delevingne: it is entirely to her credit that her personality unabashedly outshines the expensive clothes she models. But it does mean that, as a model, she is not the new Moss.

Then there's the zeitgeist argument, that Cara – with her mouthiness and tweeting and Harry Styles-ing – represents the current youth zeitgeist the way Moss did back when she posed for Corinne Day on a beach in the 90s. Now, this argument has a bit more weight, but it is really just as daft, seeing as you might as well then call her "the new Justin Bieber" or "the new Vine".

As with anything that is described as "the new xyz", the only lesson to learn here is that the person doing the describing is pretty lazy and has an especially reductive view of the world. Cara is not the new Kate, but anyone who describes her as being such is definitely the new dodo brain.



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