Kate Moss as cultural vanishing point

(I think) Sam Jacob thinks we are at once subsuming and exploring our individual identity within our cultural identity via Kate Moss:

Every culture has its centre of gravity, every era its ground zero - a vanishing point that everything disappears into and flows out of. Often it's an abstract idea like beauty, truth, valour, or honesty. And often that quality is personified in figures like John Bull or Liberty, Right now and right here, that might well be Kate Moss.

Last month saw the Kate Moss / Top Shop launch that had been anticipated in magazines as varied as Vogue & Take a Break. We've seen this kind of deal before - celebrity-designers with ghost-written collections for high street retailers, (most recently Madonna's terrible Weimar lesbian outfits for H&M). We've had high fashion designers knocking out mass-market clobber causing riots at opening time. This time it feels different - and it's a lot to do with the protagonists. Both Kate and TopShop fascinate because they scrape across the normal stratification of culture.

It's a collision of the everyday with the singularly unique, of high style with high street of individual liberty and mass consumption. They are opposites that folds in on product like a Klein Bottle, a non-orientable surface with no distinction between the "inside" and "outside" that keeps on flowing into itself. Counter culture flows into shop counter.

I find the interplay of identity contexts Sam is grappling with here quite fascinating. The concept of a governing quality for a culture at any given point in history is also attractive at first glance, but I suspect that that quality is in the eye of the perceiver. Surely there is a whole, evolving web of attributes that inform the direction and focus of a culture, and the particular one that Sam sees as primary may be secondary to another observer? An intriguing piece, nevertheless.