The look of love

By Ella cambridge

The look of love is well documented, featuring puppy dog eyes and a lovesick gaze. But this look is no longer just a gaze; it’s an actual look, an outfit. It seems like spending enough time with someone leads to dressing in each other’s image. Over time, love becomes all-encompassing, unconditional, and imitation follows. Imitation is a natural process that can be seen in many aspects of a relationship, including mannerisms, interests, and dress. Dress is a signifier of our personalities and how we visually share our inner world. This organic imitation among couples helps foster a sense of unity, embodying the look of love in a fashion form.

It is in Pete Doherty’s and Kate Moss’s relationship that drugs, blood, music and love intersect to create a problematic yet infamous display of the LOOK of love. Kate Moss’s look was inextricably connected with the 1990s Heroin Chic era which was characterised by emaciation and glorified drug use. Pete Doherty’s look reflected his inner chaos as, at the time, he had been fired from his own band, The Libertines, for drug use. Both Kate and Pete embodied a chic, dishevelled look that reflected their troubling realities.

The word “louche” is apt here, French for something of questionable taste or morality but highly attractive. In the early 2000s, their “louche” look peppered the pages of every tabloid magazine. Whilst a voyeuristic invasion of private life, these paparazzi photos give a great insight into the role of imitation in their style.

Often their looks centred on a similar palette of mostly cool tones draped with crucifixes, pearls and skinny scarves. At other times, their clothes appeared to be shared, with Pete regularly seen in a cropped military jacket that was most definitely taken from Kate’s wardrobe. Next to him is Kate in a waistcoat of a similar calibre. Both their shared colour palette and clothes epitomised indie sleaze, embodying traits of hedonism and chaos. But it also signified something bigger: their united front against the world, which sought to exploit them

"What we are left with is a raw, confrontational display of their lost love "

Pete’s other band, Babyshambles, has a song featuring Kate called “La belle et la bete”. It perfectly allegorises the destructive element of the media in their relationship. Documenting a "coked-up pansy" living a life of excess, it blurs the lines between beauty and the beastly.

Their shared style mirrors this tension, with their crucifixes and pearls signifying beauty amongst drug-fuelled pain. However, these destructive elements were paramount to the breakdown of their relationship. It was after Kate Moss was photographed at a Babyshambles recording, racking lines of coke, that they split.

What we are left with is a raw, confrontational display of their lost love through media’s documentation of their style and movements. After their breakup, Kate sent Pete a letter simply stating: ‘You're in my veins, you fuck’, inferring that imitation supersedes the temporality of a relationship. Dress, mannerisms, and interests we shared with a past partner haunt us, and I think that can be painful but beautiful.