At the mirror, Moss picks up The Product with her fingertips so as not to scratch her beetle-black nail polish, and presses it to her enviable lips. It glides on, pink as a baby's tongue. The precious substance will make your lips puffy and sweet, like hers. At 37 her skin still looks flawless.She kisses herself in the mirror. No longer the waif, she is now a French courtesan, self-assured, self-kept and free to choose her poisons...

...Of which, off-screen, she has many. You are expected to remember that she likes her boys and girls tricky and wild, starting with Johnny Depp, including a micro-fling with Courtney Love and transitioning into her incipient marriage to The Kills guitarist, Jamie Hince. Her birthday celebrations, notoriously, go on for days. Her most recent do, a pre-marital ladies night themed "Kate's Big, Fat Gypsy Hen Night," included 300 bottles of Mahiki rum ($81.93 for size "medium"). In defiance of French law, she recently sauntered down Louis Vuitton's runway smoking a cigarette. Back in 2005 The Daily Mirror's front page showed her preparing and snorting cocaine. The sordid image cost her several modeling contracts, but re-hab redeemed her and her fees soon doubled; Dior, among others, needed her to sex up their brand's musty respectability. She now reportedly has £42 million. She doesn't have to care what you think of her.

She works as hard as she plays, launching line after line: bags, clothes, jams. And those other lines? Does the lady still ...? It's a question Dior's fantasy teasingly exploits.

Back to that ad:

Wearing huge black sunglasses---the sort Jackie Kennedy relied upon to hide her widow's tears, Moss makes her way through a swarm of paparazzi. The director, Jonas Akerlund, who also directed Madonna and Lady Gaga videos, has switched to black and white, evoking a time of Dolce Vita when addiction was more vice than disease and aristocratic pleasures were often cut with downers, existential angst, ennui.

"Great POT-tea last night,"(1) she murmurs, wearily, under the blaze of a cervical chandelier.

Ensconced in her limo and back in color, she succumbs, once again, to a bout of sensuous lipstick re-application as her chariot whisks her off to Dior's runway show. Her fashionista drawl, clarified by subtitles: "A girl can't make an entrance without her lipstick."

Kate's true addiction, we are asked to believe, is to Dior. She gazes up worshipfully at Dior's unwearable ball gowns, claps, murmurs approval.

"Be iconic," is Dior's advice. Like her.

Needless to say, the ad is quite amusing. It is winkingly corrupt, lush, defiantly shameless... glamour porn, really, but delicious. Palm your mouse in the privacy of your cubicle and enjoy.

But it's not an easy pleasure, this "Dior Addict---Be iconic," business; its edgy edge cuts deep.

For one thing, it represents a strange triumph by a group called Faces and Voices of Recovery (FAVOR) that back in 2002 protested Dior's original campaign for its Addict line. As reported by Fashion pundit Robin Givhan described the early video as: (2)

"... an Internet film featuring a sweaty and anxious model who appears to be craving a fix . . . of Dior Addict lipstick. Her jones is satisfied by the film's end when she smears a bright red gloss on her pouting lips. The tag line for the campaign is 'Admit it.'"

In another spot, a similarly strung out Dior Addict addict spritzed herself with their perfume in a darkened doorway.  

Insisting (despite much contrary evidence) that "Addiction is not fashionable!" FAVOR, according to its Website, prevailed:

"in the end, Parfums Christian Dior vowed to recast its campaign in a way that distinguished between consumer 'addiction' to their scent and the overall lifestyle and condition of real addiction to alcohol and drugs."

FAVOR has had no complaints about the Moss ads, at least not yet. Its position seems to be that a "real" addiction to alcohol and drugs must take place in dark, gritty streets, not Bentleys---as if agony and elegance never shot up together. Worse, the group implicitly buys Dior's cheery assurance that an addiction to consumerism can't possibly be as destructive to families, society or individual happiness as "real" addictions to chemical intoxicants.

One might quibble a bit with that. Particularly if one's addiction to consumerism manifests as a desire to "Be iconic," that is to be a product, a brand, an image consumed as an object of desire and worship rather than as someone who, at least in private, connects with others.

You don't have to be a supermodel to realize that, with or without Dior's video teases, glamour and fame can be gateway drugs, emotionally unsustainable ego highs whose lows tend to produce cravings for frequently re-applied chemical enhancement. Didn't Kate Moss's friend, designer John Galliano, just recently drink himself into a puddle of Nazi-babble and out of a job?(3) 

Granted, in an economy of intangibles---financial "instruments," apps, games, "social networks," etc., marketing yourself as a megabrand has been one of the few realistic career paths for the likes of Oprah, Lady Gaga and company, so Dior's command to "Be iconic" can be taken, tongue-in-cheek, as good---but uselessly vague---professional advice, the equivalent of "Buy low; sell high."