Life Through a Rolled-up Fiver

Is that a zit or a freckle?" It was hard, from the photo, to tell. There were faint streaks around the left eye that could have been crows' feet or bleed from her mascara. Either way, the most compelling thing about pictures of Kate Moss apparently snorting cocaine through a rolled-up fiver, published in the Mirror last week, was that however hard you looked you still couldn't find evidence to confirm that she was actually human.

The 31-year-old model was secretly filmed taking drugs with her boyfriend, Pete Doherty, in a recording studio in west London, which as exclusives go might only have been equalled if Liberace had ever, officially come out. There should be a word for it: when a common assumption, long withheld from the public for lack of evidence, is finally stood up and which despite its obviousness a newspaper feels obliged to release like a scream.

There is still a lot more to come out. Everyone is wondering who took the 45-minute video, not least inside the Moss camp, where a lot of squirming and finger-pointing is now rumoured to be going on. The model herself is variously reported to be "terrified" about the safety of her modelling contracts and "laughing her head off" at the triviality of it all. Neither of these positions does much to substantiate the possibility that she exists in the third dimension.

The Mirror, meanwhile, has finally got all that pent-up frustration out of its system. "Cocaine Kate, supermodel snorts line after line" it yelled last Thursday, with the promise of "more amazing pictures inside". In fact, the pictures were grainy as an ultrasound and the accompanying dialogue - "Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck off! Just fuck off!" - between the model and the Mirror journalist was not brimming with insight. And yet the overall effect was an odd combination of what Doherty, quoted in the Sun the next day, called "no big deal" and what even the most casual follower of Moss's career admitted was quite fascinating.

If there is a big deal, it's not to do with the model's drug habits, but rather with her supernatural ability to appear as "Kate Moss" in even the most trying of circumstances. Unlike all other categories of celebrity, models are actively discouraged from having a personality: their success as the nearest thing on earth to the platonic ideal of beauty is directly proportional to how little of themselves they pollute it with. Over the course of her career, Moss has been brilliant at this.

It is impossible to think of a figure, post-Garbo, who has so successfully avoided talking to the press and so flag up the shortfall between the image she is paid to present and the real thing. She is almost never off duty and it is easy to believe, when you see her stalking through the mud backstage at Glastonbury, tossing her head and throwing out seductive looks to people wearing plastic bin-liners, that her whole world is now a catwalk.

It's a hard one to figure out, the chaotic private life combined with a relationship with the media that has, from the off, been subject to an iron control. By its very nature, it's impossible to know what motivates Moss's reticence, but her blankness has not only protected her from the worst ravages of tabloid scandal, but also enabled her career as one of the most successful models of her generation.

The early indications are that last week's headlines won't do anything to seriously threaten her appeal. The day after the scandal broke, she was pictured coming out of a restaurant in New York with her dark glasses slightly askew, but otherwise in pristine, model condition, hair flying about, cigarette casually in one hand and, despite her tirade at the journalist, not looking seriously shaken. Standing beside her, as a useful benchmark of what most hard-partyers look like, was a typically stunned and shambolic-seeming Doherty.

Most of the fashion houses she represents, including Chanel, Burberry and Dior, refused to comment, but the highstreet chain H&M, which is due to use her in a forthcoming campaign, said it was in discussions with her agent and would make a decision after that. The only thing that might bring her down is a domino run of other revelations that, now that the lid is off, tabloid journalists will be hoping to pour out. Incidental details about drugs for breakfast and three-day binges in Ibiza that bunched up behind the main headlines like storm clouds are only a fraction of the rumours now circulating. It is customary in the media age for a celebrity on the skids to redeem herself by confessing all to a sympathetic chatshow host. Moss can probably only save herself, as she made herself, through silence.