Kate Moss speaks! Model uses interview to attack paparazzi

She is the nearest thing we have to one of those glamorous, untouchable, Garbo-style stars of the 1930s. In an age of instant media, where even the biggest celebrities bare their souls and reveal their lives in the pages of Hello! or the tabloid press, the supermodel Kate Moss has maintained a dignified silence.

Although she is followed everywhere by paparazzi and plays on her bad-girl image, to the delight of the press, Moss has never given an interview and never spoken publicly.

Now, however, the 33-year-old Croydon-born model has broken her silence - sort of.

In an interview with British Vogue, published today, Moss sheds a little light on the ups and downs of a latter-day celebrity's lifestyle.

Unfortunately for the media, however, she says nothing on her musician boyfriend Pete Doherty, or the allegations of cocaine-taking that briefly threatened to wreck her career in 2005.

She reveals, for example, how the paparazzi have become a permanent part of her life, so much so that she can rarely walk anywhere. "There are degrees of privacy," she says. "For instance, if I'm taking Lila [her four-year-old daughter] to school, that's not OK.

"Once I was walking from The Mercer [hotel] in New York down the street (because otherwise I don't walk anywhere), and this woman paparazzo who was following me fell over a fire hydrant and her whole tooth went through her lip. I leant over her, saying, 'Are you all right?' and she was still taking pictures. I was, 'You know what? You are sick in the head.' And she was really surprised that I had stopped. Like I was going to leave her bleeding."

Moss, who was discovered at the age of 14 by the director of the Storm model agency at New York's JFK airport, adds that the police are now considering serving Asbos on some of the photographers who follow her.

The supermodel, who has graced more than 300 magazine covers, "reluctantly" agreed to the interview in order to plug her new range for the high street chain Top Shop. She has designed some 80 items, which go on sale in May in 300 stores.

"I'd talked to lots of people in the business about designing my own thing," she says. "Everyone said I should do something, but I didn't want to be a 'designer' designer and have to do shows and all of it. I've seen that stress."

She was inspired, she tells Vogue's editor Alexandra Shulman, by her own wardrobe - made up of clothes ordered from fashion shoots because she can't go shopping.

"I kind of got bits from my closet," she says. "We started dragging things out I liked. We looked at stuff and I said, 'Well, what if it was like this or that, and in this fabric or that?'"

The fashion shoot for the range has been styled on the image of the legendary New York nightclub Studio 54.

"I was like, I'm not feeling it," Moss says. "It wasn't how I wanted the clothes to be, that pretty, light kind of thing. I though it should be a bit more edgy. I'd just got this book of photographs about that club Studio 54 and I wanted it more like that."

Despite what would seem to be a party-filled, frolicsome lifestyle, Moss also says that when she is not working she is always home in time to put her daughter to bed and read her a story.

"She comes in at bedtime and says, 'Mummy, do you think this is a good look?'" the model says, "and then she has a fashion crisis. I say, 'You will wear what I tell you', but she says she is the adult of the bedroom. Now we lay the clothes out before she goes to bed but then she goes, 'Mum, I need options'. She's a mini-me."