Golden girl Kate Moss denies anorexia

A solid gold sculpture of a naked Kate Moss (detail pictured) by the British artist Mark Quinn was unveiled at the British Museum on Wednesday. Entitled Siren, it forms the centrepiece of a contemporary art show, Statuephilia, and is thought to be the largest gold statue created since the time of ancient Egypt. The art work will no doubt attract comments about the model's svelteness (and more besides), a subject Moss addresses in the latest issue of the American magazine Interview.

The supermodel, who rarely talks to the media, muses on the reasons for her skinniness, laying the blame firmly at the doorstep of the fashion industry's failure to supply adequate canapes. "I didn't eat for a long time," she says. "Not on purpose. You'd be on shoots with bad food or get on a plane and the food would be so disgusting you couldn't eat it. You go to a show and there's no food at all ... I remember standing up in the bath one day and... I was so thin! I was never anorexic... I remember thinking, I don't want to be this skinny."

Her remarks come at a time when the fashion industry is trying to
clean up its act. In the UK, a committee, the Model Health Inquiry, was formed last year to help improve the wellbeing of models. However, not everything has gone according to plan. Last week the industry heard that plans for a model health certificate, which models would produce to show a doctor had certified them "fit to work", had been rejected by New York, Milan and Paris.