Kate Moss' early Calvin Klein shoot with actor Mark Wahlberg is among the most iconic of her career, not to mention the fact that it launched her as an international face. So imagine our surprise to hear from the model herself that she wasn't the designer brand's first choice to front the campaign. In her new tome Kate: The Kate Moss Book, which the Croydon wonder launched with an A-list party at the Marc Jacobs store in London last week, she reveals that French chanteuse Vanessa Paradis had first refusal.

La Moss explained "Patrick [Demarchelier] was shooting the new campaign for Calvin. Bruce [Weber] had done it for years, and Calvin had asked Patrick to do it. They wanted Vanessa Paradis, but she said no." The near misses don't stop there - the mother-of-one then held up proceedings by 'umming' and 'ahhing' over whether the shoot was right for her. She confessed: "I can still remember asking Paul Cavaco, 'Do you think I should do this Calvin contract?' And he said, 'You know what? You're so small, you might not last. It could be all over in a season! Take the money and run!' I worked at Calvin for eight years. I just didn't know if it was right for me. I thought it might stop me being able to do other things. I think I just saw it all as a way of getting out of Croydon. I definitely didn't want to stay where I was."

If Kate hadn't got out of Croydon, she wouldn't have met Johnny Depp who she dated for four years and who incidentally went on to become the father of Vanessa Paradis' children. As we've discovered, getting the nod from Calvin and experiencing the love of Johnny isn't the only thing the two style icons have in common...

Scroll through the gallery to explore a tale of parallel fashion lives >>