Corinne Day’s portraits of Kate Moss

London, Feb. 5: Kate Moss, today a somewhat tarnished icon for her brushes with cocaine and the troubled Babyshambles singer Pete Doherty, is nonetheless is to join kings, queens and Prime Ministers in Britain’s equivalent to a hall of fame, the National Portrait Gallery.

This montage of the nine faces of Moss, who has just turned 33, was commissioned by the gallery to be the centrepiece of its new crowd-pulling exhibition, Face of Fashion, opening on February 15.

The montage was shot in December by Corinne Day, the fashion photographer whose “heroin chic” pictures of the model for Vogue 14 years ago — gangly in her underwear and surrounded by a halo of fairy lights in a grubby flat — introduced grunge to fashion photography. Day’s new multi-image is definitively post-grunge, showing the model laughing, frowning, pulling a face and, in the central image, resembling an angelic Florentine beauty that has leapt out of a Titian.

Moss’s reaction to Day’s new images was self-deprecating. “I’ve got crooked teeth, bow legs, a wonky nose,” said the model. Day said: “It’s very intimate. I wanted the shots to be genuine so that when people look at them each picture will say something different.” The National Portrait Gallery says that fashion photography is the new portraiture. The exhibition will feature more than 100 fashion shoot images of Moss, Madonna, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Justin Timberlake and Sharon Stone taken by the world’s top fashion photographers.

Sandy Nairne, director of the gallery, said: “Fashion surrounds us. It may sometimes irritate us but it has an influence which is undeniable.”

The exhibition, which runs until May 28, is expected to be a huge money-earner. After it closes, the nine faces of Moss will join the images of the nation’s statesmen, Nobel prize-winners and monarchs in the Gallery’s permanent collection.