If you grew up in the ‘90s or early 2000s, you’ve very likely heard the phrase, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” The infamous line was, of course, uttered by supermodel Kate Moss. At the time, Moss was famous for embodying the fashion industry’s obsession with the “heroin chic” look: waify bodies, pale skin, eye bags and shoots and subjects that looked like they were in the middle of a three-day bender.
The phrase quickly surpassed Moss herself, becoming a symbol of the damaging diet culture peddled to young women through magazines and advertisements of the time that we’re only today beginning to move beyond and heal from.
Though it feels like Moss is trolling us all with the recent announcement of her new role as the creative director of Diet Coke — “diet” being the operative word — in a new interview, the supermodel addressed being synonymous with the harmful phrase, saying she’s never had, nor wanted to promote, the eating disorder anorexia.
In a new interview for BBC‘s Desert Island Discs, Moss revealed she actually can’t be credited with creating the slogan, either, but rather she adopted it after seeing it on the fridge of her then-housemate, hairdresser James Brown, who had added it to their kitchen as a joke. “So basically I was doing an interview and at the time I was living with Jimmy B and a friend and she was a bit of a snacker,” Moss said.
“So on the fridge, Jimmy B had written ‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.’ I don’t know why but it just popped into my mind because that’s what was happening at the time, we were saying it because it was funny,” Moss said. “But it was completely taken out of context.”
Moss added she disagrees with how her image has become a poster for the “heroin chic” era, saying during the radio broadcast, “I think I was a scapegoat for a lot of people’s problems.”
She continued, “I was never anorexic — I never have been. I had never taken heroin. I was thin because I didn’t get fed at shoots or shows and I had always been thin.” Referencing the Corinne Day shoot in question, wherein Moss in pictured in her underwear in her apartment, Moss said she wasn’t glamorizing drugs it was simply, “a fashion shoot and it was shot at my flat and that was how I could afford to live at the time.”
In 2018, Moss first admitted she regrets saying the comment, adding how positive it is that the fashion industry is finally becoming more diverse. “There’s so much more diversity now, I think it’s right,” she told NBC in 2018. “There’s so many different sizes and colors and heights. Why would you just be a one-size model and being represented for all of these people?”
Since opening her own modeling agency, Moss is much healthier now, too — though she does still smoke. “I take care of myself now, I’m a good girl,” she said. “I go to bed, I drink lots of water, not too much coffee, and I’m trying to cut down on cigarettes.”
