Fashion Victim: Will any of us deign to copy Agyness?

Mar 6 2008 by Emma Johnson, Liverpool Daily Post

ANOTHER week, another best dressed list. This time, it is Tatler telling us who has got it wrong and right over the past year.

One of my colleagues once claimed that Tatler is a magazine “for people who keep a luxury apartment in Mayfair to store their Balenciaga handbags in” and while I would like to assure you that while I neither have a pad in Mayfair nor a Balenciaga handbag (although I do have a Mulberry and a couple from Vivienne Westwood), I love Tatler magazine.

I have been obsessed with it ever since I succumbed to one of those three issues for £1 offers about five years ago and never got around to cancelling the subscription.

I have absolutely nothing in common with the people it features, other than an addiction to spending money (the difference is they have it and I don’t) but I love to peer into their lives where they pay people to do their fake fireplace logs and have affairs with the hired help.

But Tatler and I do have the same taste in fashion, it seems, because for the past few years it has placed Croydon clotheshorse Kate Moss at the top of its best-dressed list.

As regular readers of this column know, I am a little Mossy-obsessed – it is her fault that I am at my local Toni and Guy almost weekly for a fringe trim, and she is the reason why I am currently hitting the gym three times a week as I plan to re-create her classic festival wardrobe (hotpants and wellies) for this year’s Creamfields.

So imagine my shock to discover that this year Ms Moss has lost her crown to one Agyness Deyn.

Given that she is the first model in more than a decade who has come close to rivalling Kate for exposure or campaigns, one imagines Mossy won’t be too happy about it, either.

A former chip shop worker from north Manchester, Agyness is the current queen of the Brit fashion pack along with her best friend designer Henry Holland and the club kids from London night Boombox.

Hers is a scene alarmingly similar to the one Kate Moss herself headed up a few years ago when “Mossy’s posse” of Kate, Sadie Frost, Davinia Taylor, Fran Cutler and Meg Mathews were ruling London’s hippest parties.

While Kate still holds the record for the most Vogue covers and fronts campaigns for Donna Karan, Longchamp and Yves Saint Laurent, plus her longstanding contract with cosmetics giant Rimmel, Agyness (real name Laura Hollins) is certainly catching up.

The current model of the year can be seen in ads for Burberry – where she replaces Kate – and Armani and has just become the face of High Street chain New Look.

Whether the 24-year-old will ever create the same sort of slavish female following Kate has achieved in her 19-year career remains to be seen.

However, I am thinking the litmus test may not actually be in whether we copy her bleached crop or tomboy styling, but if she can succeed in making the name Agyness (it’s pronounced Agnes) fashionable again.

That would be really impressive.