So familiar, so utterly redolent of their time have they become, that it is hard to recall just how alien, shocking and strange Corinne Day's photos for the June 1993 issue of Vogue seemed at first. Edgier magazines (i-D, the Face, Dazed and Confused) had already documented the aesthetic that was sensationally labelled "heroin chic". But when the mighty Vogue published Day's pictures of a vacant-faced Moss clad in low-slung tan tights, posed next to a radiator which resembled her build, a hurricane of disapproval was unleashed.
Day died last Friday, 27 August, aged 48, from brain cancer. She will be remembered for her close association with Moss at the beginning of the model's career, and in particular for two specific photo stories: the Vogue shoot and, three years before that, a cover story for the Face featuring Moss's puckish, 15-year-old features grinning beneath a feathered headdress. The coverline read: "The 3rd Summer of Love". Inside, the magazine showed Moss in black-and-white: half-naked, larking about on the beach, giggling. Looking at them now, they seem as quaint and antique as Victorian postcards.
But it was that Vogue underwear shoot (the word lingerie seems too rarefied for the vests and pants she was shot in) that defined Day. The immediate reaction was ferocious. Susie Orbach, author of Fat is a Feminist Issue, described the photographs as "just this side of porn". Marcelle D'Argy Smith, then editor of Cosmopolitan, said: "The pictures are hideous and tragic. I believe they can only appeal to the paedophile market." The New York Times succinctly described Moss's look as "very young and very dead". Four years later, there was still fallout. Day's shoot was widely referenced when no less an authority than the president of the United States, Bill Clinton, opined that "fashion photos in the last few years have made heroin addiction seem glamorous and sexy and cool".
Then as now, Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman, who commissioned the shoot, finds it hard to comprehend the extremity of the reaction. "I remember being on holiday at the time," she said yesterday, "and I couldn't understand what the fuss was about. I thought they were lovely pictures, and we certainly weren't trying to do anything sensationalist. I felt that if you looked in the changing rooms in high-street stores, or if you looked in young girls' bedrooms, that's what you saw. Kate looked like the most beautiful version of girls at school.
"It seemed strange to object to this kind of thing rather than the usual kind of photos with all the makeup, the padded bras, all the artifice. But I think it was really about the context. People felt betrayed by Vogue – it was supposed to be a beacon of old-fashioned glamour and this was so downbeat." In 1993, the magazine was hungover from the glitz and glitter of the 1980s. With the Day shoot, they finally nailed their colours to the mast. The shoot reflected the fact that things had changed, to say the least.
With hindsight, the power of Day's pictures is that they seem to echo a moment in British cultural history, one that goes beyond the emergence of grunge as a fashion trend, and might also call to mind the grubbier shores of Britpop, the youthful antics of artists such as Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas, and the publication of novels such as Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting.
As artefacts in the history of feminism, I am less certain of their status. Day's own great success was in self-creation: she left school with a single O-level, started out as a bank clerk, then worked for free on the Face before establishing herself as a photographer who made, says Shulman, "ordinariness remarkable" and whose pictures were "better and better the less ornate they were". In 1993, and today, there were few women photographers working on Vogue, and when I worked there briefly from 1995-6, the prevailing if unedifying dynamic was of female editors soothing the vast egos of male snappers.
At the time, Moss was called a "superwaif" and waifish is how she appears in the Vogue pictures: a woman-child in the long tradition of Dickens's Dora Spenlow and Berg's Lulu. The Spice Girls were launched in 1994, and the waif was replaced in popular culture by a noisier, and longer-lasting, model of young womanhood – the spuriously liberated ladette. It is hard to discern which was worse: the cure or the disease.