Nursing an oat-milk matcha latte, in a neighbourhood café in north-west London, Lila Moss is describing her perfect Sunday. She would start it by lighting a Diptyque Baies candle and drawing a bath. “I love baths,” she enthuses. “I used to have an amazing view from my bath in Highgate…” She trails off. Her eyes well up and tears begin spilling down her freckled, heart-shaped face. “Oh my god,” she squeals, hands fluttering as she accepts a napkin. “I was not expecting that!”
It’s been an emotional week for 19-year-old Lila Grace, signalling a new chapter in her and her mother Kate Moss’s life. After 11 years in their Grade II*-listed 17th-century house, decorated in Kate’s comfortable take on rock’n’roll style – think Damien Hirst butterfly paintings, squashy sofas and antique chandeliers – the Mosses are selling up. Two days ago, Lila moved in with her dad, the co-founder of Dazed Media Jefferson Hack, who has a home in Islington where she spent weekends growing up. “We’re really close. Our big thing is playing cards together – I usually win,” she says, smiling as she regains composure. “I’m liking being at his house. And I’m excited for the change. But yeah, moving out was sad.”
Wiping away traces of sparkly eyeshadow and mascara, she tucks stray strands of her long, straight blonde hair behind her ears. She’s wearing a lilac and red cable-knit Stine Goya sweater she bought from The RealReal, paired with vintage bottle-green corduroy flares and a vintage black leather coat she pinched from her mother, plus the Gen Z-requisite black Dr Martens boots. An energetic storyteller, quick to mock herself, she could be any other gabbling teenager as she launches into anecdotes of cringeworthy discoveries unearthed during the packing process in her well-polished voice – a surprise for those used to her mother’s Croydon rasp. “I found some poems, which were so funny: ‘Darkness is a rainbow,’” she intones dramatically, before bursting into giggles. “I was like, ‘Oh, Lila, you were so deep.’” Then again, she isn’t just any other London teenager. And the house – once the home of the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge – wasn’t just a house. Rather, it was a haven for Lila when her mother’s every move was documented by the photographers who camped outside, so omniscient that Lila’s first word was “nazzi”, a child’s shortening of “paparazzi”.
She was eight when she began to really process her mother’s fame. “That was when I realised the paparazzi thing, that they were interested in her, for some reason,” she recalls, choosing her words carefully. “Then I went to secondary school and everyone was like, ‘Oh, your mum’s Kate Moss!’ You don’t really have a filter when you’re that young and I was like,” she puts on a high-pitched voice, “‘How do you know who she is? She’s old! She’s old and boring!’” Early tabloid photographs show Lila glowering menacingly at the cameras. “There’s one of me in a fur coat and I’m like, growling,” she says, laughing. “I was quite protective over my mum,” she adds. “All my mum’s friends say that I was so scary as a child. I was quite serious. But also, I would always copy her. She would always have her head down and not look at the camera, so I’d always put my head down and not look at the camera. I still do it.”
Kate was equally protective over Lila. Famously private, the model rarely gave interviews, even as she continued her inexorable ascent from new-face waif to runway superstar to fashion legend. (Moss, deeply proud of her daughter, declined to give a quote for this piece, wanting Lila to have the spotlight.) Lila’s upbringing was a carefully managed mix of the ordinary (she proudly recalls playing Blousey Brown in her year 6 production of Bugsy Malone, a musical that played on repeat in the Moss household) and the extraordinary (when asked if she has ever been star-struck, she relays a tale of being 11 and meeting teen heart-throb Zac Efron at then-Givenchy creative director Riccardo Tisci’s 40th birthday party in Ibiza). Naturally, they rolled with a decidedly starry crowd: some of Lila’s closest childhood friends are Iris Law, daughter of actors Jude Law and Sadie Frost, and Stella Jones, progeny of The Clash’s Mick Jones and film producer Miranda Davis. But it’s stood her in good stead: she is warm, engaging, unfailingly polite, though there is the odd no-go zone. She’s wary, for instance, about discussing where the family will move to next – for now, Kate will be based in her Gloucestershire home. “But we’re in a new phase,” she says, decisively.
There’s more than a touch of a Saffy-Edina relationship about Mosses junior and senior. “Lila’s very sensible,” says hairstylist James Brown, who is Kate’s oldest friend and Lila’s godfather. “As a kid she was super studious, really well behaved.” That responsible streak has persisted: she’s not out painting the town every night. “She’s like the angel on my shoulder, giving me advice,” says Stella Jones, Lila’s best friend since childhood, laughing. “She’s definitely the most responsible [in our group]. She can be quite bossy! She knows all the best places, she’s always booking restaurants, organising everything.”
She is necessarily disciplined: she has Type 1 diabetes and discreetly checks her blood-sugar levels on an app several times during the course of our conversation, always politely asking each time if I mind, before putting her phone, its phone case featuring Baloo from The Jungle Book, back in her Chanel bag. The phone thing strikes me as unusual: in contrast to almost everyone I know, famous or otherwise, Lila seems totally disinterested in it. “If we’re in the country for the weekend, Lila’s phone will be ringing in her room where she left it,” says Brown. “If she’s watching a film, or reading a book, she’s doing that. Kate is the same – they’re not on their phones all the time.” That said, the pair do not share the same approach to timekeeping. (In classic Moss Snr mode, last year Kate kept this writer waiting three hours for an interview in her suite at The Ritz, Paris; today, Lila was early.) “I like to be on time,” she says, smiling, “whereas my mum… she likes to be on the late side!”
Nevertheless, the two are incredibly close, with Lila recently waking up to the wardrobe-raiding opportunities that having a supermodel as a mother affords. “In the last three or four years, I’ve realised that her style is actually really cool. I’m having to admit it now,” she says, laughing. She steals Kate’s Saint Laurent coats and her Chanel 2.55 bags; Kate swipes her Adidas tracksuits. “She doesn’t have a good trackies selection. She only has pyjamas,” says Lila. “She probably would hate me saying that. She doesn’t want anyone to know she wears trackies.” The two have identical taste in books and television. “We love watching Law & Order. It’s Mum’s favourite thing to watch before bed. All the crime shows on Netflix… tick, tick, tick,” she says.
Lila’s first steps as a model were taken cautiously. It’s no secret Kate wasn’t keen. “My mum always put me off [modelling],” Lila says. “She was always like, ‘If you wanna do it, you can, but I wouldn’t recommend it.’” Moss started modelling at 14 and has admitted she felt traumatised by straddling a shirtless Marky Mark for the 1992 Calvin Klein campaign. “Nobody takes care of you mentally,” she told Vanity Fair in 2012. “There’s a massive pressure to do what you have to do.” Launching her own talent agency in 2017 was a turning point, allowing her to give new faces the support she herself never had. Lila is signed to Kate Moss Agency, as is her best friend Stella. “When I was younger she was scared that I’d fall into the same trap, I think,” muses Lila. But it took the teenager a while to feel comfortable in front of the camera. “I remember Mum asked me to do something with her when I was 13. I said yes. And then I woke up and I was like, ‘I can’t do it!’ I was so shy – and I had braces.”
Sign up to the Vogue Daily newsletter
She overcame the nerves to shoot her first campaign for Marc Jacobs Beauty when she was 15. “I know Marc, and I love his stuff and what he does, so I felt like it was right,” she recalls. She has gone on to star in the Marc Jacobs Perfect fragrance campaign – “I just carried on!” she says, laughing sweetly – though not before finishing school with A levels in photography, fashion textiles and media studies. Her first catwalk booking was for Miu Miu, when she opened and closed the spring/summer 2021 show just one week after her 18th birthday. She’s gone on to walk for Richard Quinn and in September 2021’s blockbuster “Fendace” event alongside her mother, where she strolled the reflective runway in a Versace by Fendi baroque-printed swimsuit that incidentally showed off her Omnipod insulin pump. “That was epic,” she says, grinning, recalling the show. “She was very particular about her look,” says friend and artistic director of Fendi womenswear and couture Kim Jones. “She likes to dress up and knows what she likes to wear. But I love the way Lila is just Lila – she has a confidence about her.”
This British Vogue cover is another milestone for Moss. She excitedly shows me some behind-the-scenes pictures from the set in New York. In one she is eating a chia pudding in a futuristic Loewe look; in another she is being sewn into a corset. Does she feel anxious at the thought that modelling success may well bring the fame from which her parents tried to protect her? “Not really,” she says. “I’ve seen it first-hand, so I’m much more able to cope with it. I’ve had to say no to people. But I’m always nice!”
The light is fading in north-west London as we contemplate carrot cake, but then we are asked to vacate our table. It seems being a thrice-weekly mushrooms-on-toast customer and burgeoning fashion star is not enough to secure a coveted Greenberry Café spot in Primrose Hill past the allotted time. We walk down a tree-lined street towards the park, where Lila brings her dogs, Archie and Stanley, for a runaround when they’re not at the family pad in the Cotswolds. I ask what’s on her bucket list for 2022. “I’d like to learn how to knit,” she exclaims. “I really wanna be good at making my own clothes. I think that’s so cool.” Any professional goals? “I’d love to work with [photographer] Gray Sorrenti,” she ventures. “And my favourite brand – every time I go in there I want everything – is YSL. Obsessed. So that would be pretty cool. Hint, hint,” she says, giggling. Given that her mother is an unofficial ambassador for the brand, it shouldn’t be too far-fetched. “I’m joking!” she insists.
We reach her car, a new electric Mini. She just passed her test and is building up her confidence after a disastrous first drive out with her mum in the vintage white Mini she received for her 18th birthday. “We were just driving round the block, really – very much in the vicinity of Highgate School, where I used to go,” she recalls. “And I got to the corner and I stalled, because it was kind of up a hill. These four boys from the year below me start screaming at me, ‘Go, Lila! You passed!’ and I’m like, ‘Mum, I can’t do this.’ I had to get out the car. I went bright red and she had to drive us home. I’m a bit traumatised; I haven’t driven it since.” Perhaps all those years of paparazzi stalking finally came in handy. “Oh, yeah. Look down. Walk. Smile! But look down.”
The May 2022 issue of British Vogue is on newsstands on Tuesday 26 April.
