This time, it’s Diet: Kate Moss and the dangers of celebrity endorsement

Exactly. So why not Moss?

Her reported $9 million payday will likely help cushion the blow from any further criticisms she may face. (Rotten was told by many that he’d “sold out”, and Mugler’s fragrance was called a “fallen star”.) But she’s got other reasons.

“I loved the idea of doing this because I have so many ideas,” she has said about the drink’s “Love What You love” Campaign. Moss will “continue to showcase the positive attitude of Diet Coke drinkers” at events in the UK throughout the northern hemisphere’s summer.

“It’s proper,” said Moss. “I’m not just showing up and being a show-pony… Being in front of and behind the camera was so exciting. Having full creative control of the look and feel of the campaign was a first for me.”

So fronting for Diet Coke is more liberating than starting her own modelling agency?

Possibly not. When she launched Kate Moss Agency six years ago, she said was driven by her “maternal side”, and wanted to take care and nurture young models “so they grow to their full capacity in anything they’d like to do, instead of being used up and tossed out”.

But Moss, who began modelling at 14 after she was scouted at an airport, has been vocal about having herself felt “terribly uncomfortable” on shoots, over the years. “There was pressure to pose topless,” she told an interviewer four years ago. “I worked with a woman photographer, Corinne Day, and she always liked me with no top on. I did not like it all when I first started… “[I’d say on some jobs] Can I just put some clothes on?′ But that was the job and so we just kind of did it.’”

And Diet Coke is treated like holy water in the fashion industry.

Karl Lagerfeld once said he drank up to 10 cans of the drink in a day. “I drink Diet Coke from the minute I get up to the minute I go to bed,” he once told Harper’s Bazaar. “I can even drink it in the middle of the night and I can sleep.” It was part of a regime that, famously, helped him lose 92 pounds in 13 months. (He was desperate to fit into Saint Laurent clothing designed by the famously slim-hipped Hedi Slimane.)

So, not dietician-approved.

Hell no. The dangers of guzzling the drink were thrust into the spotlight in 2006 when 22-year-old South American model Luisel Ramos suffered a heart attack after stepping off a runway, following a three-month diet of green leaves and Diet Coke. Not to mention what happened to one woman who tried Lagerfeld’s famous diet.

“After three in quick succession, I get very jittery,” Rebecca Harrington wrote about downing the drink to mimic Lagerfeld’s Diet Coke habit. “After four I decide I’m so jittery I can’t eat lunch or write or concentrate and just start pacing my room, which seems, all of a sudden, like a necessary activity.”

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