Yet a strange thing happened to Kate Moss on the way to rehab. Far from becoming a pariah or experiencing a serious fall from public grace, she developed an unexpected level of luster. The 32-year-old woman who has been the subject of controversial press since she was discovered at 14, the onetime waif, the person pilloried for allegedly promoting anorexia, the freewheeling seductress of the British tabloids, the tempestuous destroyer of hotel rooms, the confidante and bosom buddy of Anita Pallenberg and other rock chick survivors from the heyday of hard drugs, found herself bumped up a notch to the status of that most nebulous of beings, the cultural avatar.

And even before the model had checked out of the drying-out clinic, she was inundated in attention and work. W magazine ran a cover story on Kate Moss in November 2005. Vanity Fair made her its cover subject the following month. An issue of the influential fashion magazine French Vogue was dedicated to Ms. Moss, who also served as guest editor.

If her notoriety was bad for the brand, it is hard to see how. Even as the London police were questioning Ms. Moss in January, clients were clamoring for her services.
…
“Her image has a life of its own. What was interesting when she had all those troubles with the tabloid press about her drug-taking was that the image and the drug-taking didn’t fit and people couldn’t take that.”

Yet just as likely the reverse is true; Ms. Moss’s tabloid adventures added to the nest of magpie details that, wittingly or not, we all now seem to accumulate about celebrities and then mold into specious narratives about people we’ve never met. “And that, after all, is what a brand is,” said James Twitchell, an author and professor of English and advertising at the University of Florida. “Celebrities are these extraordinary characters who have no plot, but who are in many ways the easiest characters to follow. They don’t violate expectations because there really are none.”
…
“Edge denotes shame,” said Dr. Brody, the kind invoked when, for example, one is caught by a camera huddled over a mound of white powder, neatly chopping lines. “People use cameras to take all kinds of pictures now,” he added, alluding to the proliferation of too-intimate images widely available on sites like Craigslist.com or MySpace.com. “If you’re selling a camera in our celebrity-obsessed culture, why not use a celebrity and one who was captured at the scene of a crime?” he said.