editorial comment Well, maybe she can model for paraphernalia :) In the meantime, we will have nothing to do with H&M....Let's boycott these hypocrites. Kate Moss taking drugs? Well, that's a big surprise!

In a move with little precedent in the fashion industry, Kate Moss, one of the world's most recognizable models, was dismissed from a planned advertising campaign yesterday after executives said she had admitted to recently using cocaine.


H&M, Europe's largest clothing chain with 78 stores in the United States, had photographed Ms. Moss to promote the global introduction in Novembr of a fashion collection designed by Stella McCartney. But a spokeswoman for H&M said the campaign was canceled after Ms. Moss told store executives in New York that a report of her drug use in a London newspaper was correct.

"If someone is going to be the face of H&M," the spokeswoman, Jennifer Uglialoro, said, "it is important they be healthy, wholesome and sound."

The decision reversed an earlier statement in which H&M said it would forgive Ms. Moss and continue to use her.

The 31-year-old model, who was in New York last week during American designers' presentation of their spring 2006 collections, had met at the Mercer Hotel in SoHo with Jorgen Andersson, the Stockholm-based director of communications and marketing for H&M. There, "we heard her side of the story," Ms. Uglialoro said. "The immediate reaction was to give her a second chance."

But the public reaction to H&M's position, which was given extensive play on the Internet and in the media, was unexpectedly negative. Customers called stores over the weekend, many complaining that the company, which markets to teenagers and young adults, would be associated with a model who admitted using drugs.

"After the feedback from customers and other papers," Ms. Uglialoro said, "we decided we should distance ourselves from any kind of drug abuse."

The various modeling agencies that represent Ms. Moss referred all queries to her London lawyer, Gerard Terrell, who did not return calls yesterday.

The decision appeared to reflect the more conservative stance being taken by large apparel companies in tolerating any controversy that may come to be associated with their brands.

Ms. Moss, whose earnings have been estimated at $9 million a year, appears in ads for Chanel, Burberry, Christian Dior, Gloria Vanderbilt and H. Stern jewelers, among others.

Speculation in the fashion and modeling industries yesterday centered on whether these brands would continue to employ her. Executives at several companies, including Burberry and Dior, declined to comment, but others expressed some concern. Jack Gross, chief executive of Gloria Vanderbilt denim, which recently contracted with Ms. Moss for a year of magazine ads as part of an effort to update a label linked for decades with discount apparel, said, "We weren't aware of any issues with Kate prior to this campaign."

Mr. Gross added that since photographs of Ms. Moss apparently using drugs appeared last week in The Daily Mirror of London, he has been re-evaluating the ads featuring her, which show Ms. Moss with other models striking "Charlie's Angel" poses in front of a hot pink neon swan.

The campaign seeks to reconnect Gloria Vanderbilt with the 1970's disco scene that first brought it to prominence.

Mr. Gross said that if accusations of drug use by Ms. Moss were true, "we would have second thoughts about using Kate Moss" again.

Industry conversation turned compulsively to Ms. Moss last week, as editors, photographers and designers traded stories of the model who, as a teenager, rocketed to the top of a profession as besotted with her aura of spacey vacancy as with her gorgeous cheekbones and wide-set eyes.

"Kate Moss has been a touchstone phenomenon since the whole waif thing, lauded for her style, her career, who she dates, and constantly being cited as a muse for various designers," said Sean Patterson, the president of Wilhelmina, a venerable agency with hundreds of models.

"I don't think there has ever been a model of Kate's status who has been demonstrated in pictures to be involved with something like this."

Boyishly thin when she first hit the catwalks in the 1980's, Ms. Moss was almost immediately cast in ad campaigns for Calvin Klein and other major fashion houses, and just as quickly criticized by feminists for her underfed "waif" look and for embodying one of fashion's least admirable moments, the advent of a grimy style termed "heroin chic."

In the years since, Ms. Moss confounded her early detractors by her success, posing for the covers of every important fashion magazine and for scores of artists, among them Lucien Freud.

Just as compelling, it seemed, were her off-duty antics - the trashed hotel rooms, the stints in rehabilitation clinics, the affairs with Johnny Depp in his bad-boy incarnation and recently with Pete Doherty, the 26-year-old songwriter and front man for the English rock group Babyshambles, who has had repeated stays in rehabilitation facilities where he was treated for drug use.

Despite, or perhaps because of, Ms. Moss's louche reputation, her mainstream clientele continued to seek out her services. And the cult of Ms. Moss among fashion's insiders reached a kind of apotheosis when the Council of Fashion Designers of America anointed her in June with an award that stopped just short of calling her an industry icon.

Mr. Patterson, the president of Wilhelmina, echoed a sentiment expressed by many in the business whose dismay at her hard-partying reputation was invariably countered by admiration for her style, presentation and her ability.

Drug use has long been associated with the stylish world of models.

Gia Carangi, a Vogue model whose biography was made into a feature film starring a relatively unknown actress called Angelina Jolie in the title role, was surely the most public among the industry's drug flameouts.

But there have been numerous others, including the 1990's runway star Amy Wesson, whose much-publicized bouts with addiction essentially put an end to her career.

The heroin use prevalent in the industry during that decade before the turn of the century tapered off as cocaine returned as the fashionable drug of choice.

But as multinational corporations came to play a more prominent role in the industry, and the financial stakes grew exponentially, the fashion industry's longstanding tolerance for displays of temperament, eccentric behavior and personal peccadilloes like substance abuse diminished radically.

In a new era when even fashion is at pains to demonstrate its sobriety, the antics of stars like Ms. Moss seem somehow less amusing.

"Because a model is in many ways just a beautiful image, the personal life has historically not been that important," said Linda Wells, the editor of Allure magazine.

As they evolved, the reputation and celebrity of Ms. Moss have come to resemble those of a rock star.

"Does it then mean we're going to moralize and decide she's not worthy of representing certain lines of clothing?" Ms. Wells said.

If the reaction of H&M can be taken as an indication, it may.

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