I scrutinise the oh-so-familiar face in front of me: the cheekbones, the luminous skin and wide-set eyes. The jutting clavicles under a gauzy top — it’s not hard to see why this is the human form that single-handedly changed our idea of beauty from towering glamazon to grungy waif, cigarette in hand, in the Nineties.
Then suddenly she’s speaking: “So I got sent this outfit, and I’ve got to do a video for their clothing.” It’s textbook model chat but — oh, the treachery of images! — ceci n’est pas Kate Moss. In place of the Marlboro-ravaged south London accent is a Merseyside twang. That’s because I’m talking not to Croydon’s biggest export but to Denise Ohnona, a former worker on Liverpool’s docklands turned Kate Moss lookalike. In an age of deepfakes and filters, Ohnona’s Instagram account, @iamnotkatemoss, is catnip for those of us who love the side-by-side posts juxtaposing red carpet photos of the real Kate Moss with recreations, with clothes Ohnona sourced from Oxfam and eBay. “People ask me, where did you get the boots from, and I tell them [they were] £4 from a charity shop.” The most-liked shots come from her own imagination: “Kate” in the window of a McDonald’s, having apparently abandoned her “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” mantra for the lure of a Quarter Pounder.
DAVID LEIGH DODD
Then there’s Ohnona’s version of a Vogue film in which Moss explains her old flame Johnny Depp’s unique gifting method: “They were the first diamonds I ever owned. He pulled them out of the crack of his arse.” Ohnona lip-syncs to Kate’s original audio while miming Depp’s feat of largesse. She did the same after the court deposition in which Moss refuted the assertion Depp had pushed her down the stairs.
Unlike Kate Moss’s public tight-lipped image, Ohnona is a chatterbox. Six minutes into our conversation and she’s hardly drawn breath, telling me about everything from her stepfather’s industrial cleaning business (clients include the Everton ground; he’s in the front room as we speak, deep-cleaning her carpets) to oppressive beauty standards (“It’s all the certain nose, the perfect this and that,” she says with a sigh).
DAVID LEIGH DODD
Most of all, Ohnona is self-deprecating, keen to impress on me that she doesn’t consider herself any kind of model at all — and certainly nothing approaching Moss’s calibre. “That’s huge shoes to fill,” she says. “Kate’s the world’s most iconic supermodel. It’s not that I think I’m anything like her — not in a million years.”
In fact, she says she was perplexed when small business owners (“friends of friends”) first started to ask her to appear at events as a lookalike. She felt there was something naff about lookalikes.
Now 43, Ohnona came to the attention of fashion’s front row in 2019 after a lookalike agency booked her to appear at the designer brand Vetements’ Paris show. Wearing a gold dress that was pure Nineties Kate, she fronted a procession of lookalike models. “All I could hear was people saying, ‘Is it Kate? Oh my goodness, it is! It’s Kate.’ ” Afterwards people told her she’d nailed the Kate Moss walk. It was news to her. “I was just — you know — walking.”
DAVID LEIGH DODD
During Chanel’s recent takeover of Manchester for its Métiers d’art extravaganza, she was papped emerging from a branch of Aldi in off-duty Moss clobber: belted leather trench, ankle boots and cat-eye shades. For hours photos of her supermodel-in-the-supermarket shocker were all over social media before it was revealed to be a stunt. “It fooled the press,” Ohnona says with satisfaction. “They actually all wrote stories about it before being like, oops, we’ve been pranked.” She skirts my inquiries about how much she got paid for this masterpiece of viral theatre by confiding that she nicked the red bag for life that was her prop (approximate street value: 65p). She caresses it now. “Nice, right?”
Whereas Kate Moss has been modelling since her days as a Croydon schoolgirl, Ohnona started “becoming” Kate Moss at 37.
People have remarked on her uncanny resemblance to the supermodel since the mid-Nineties, though.
The daughter of a Scouse mother and a Moroccan man “from Casablanca”, she says she was the textbook ugly duckling. “I always hated being in school because everyone used to call me ‘alien face’. And my sister was gorgeous. I used to cry, ‘I just feel so ugly, Mum.’ ”
Ohnona with her daughter, Elise, now 13
COURTESY OF DENISE OHNONA
The comparisons to Moss left her nonplussed. “I didn’t really know who she was,” she says. When she turned 16 — by which point Moss was 22 — she was persuaded to take part in a modelling competition after her mother submitted a photo. “I think everyone became a winner because you had to pay for the modelling classes and at the end of it there was a big catwalk show, and I remember looking around and thinking, this is such a scam.”
Nevertheless, she met some local talent agencies via the contest. “They told me I didn’t have the height [for catwalk work: she is 5ft 4in to Moss’s 5ft 7in], but I could do catalogue modelling.” What she says next she delivers so matter-of-factly that I almost miss it. “But then I had my face smashed through a windscreen, so I stopped looking like Kate Moss and started looking like something out of A Nightmare on Elm Street.”
Excuse me, I say, and she slows down to detail the accident that precipitated “20 years of hell”. After leaving school Ohnona went to work in a Liverpool branch of Next. One day her boyfriend picked her up from work late.
Seconds later they rounded a corner and collided with a bus at speed. Ohnona wasn’t wearing her seatbelt and her body was propelled diagonally from the passenger seat. “My knees locked onto the steering wheel, which saved my life, but my whole face smashed through the windscreen,” she says. “When I came round, I put my hand up and it was like a river of jelly. My face was hanging off.”
The real Kate Moss testifies in Johnny Depp’s defamation trial against his ex-wife Amber Heard, May 2022, which Ohnona recreates, below
EPA
COURTESY OF DENISE OHNONA
In hospital she was operated on by a doctor who was later revealed to be untrained in plastic surgery — his work triggered surplus collagen production and thick, hypertrophic scars that can’t be covered with make-up. It was so upsetting, she says, that a doctor at Royal Liverpool Hospital wouldn’t make eye contact. “The first time I saw a mirror I collapsed on the floor in screams,” she recalls.
The accident ravaged her physical and mental health. “I was five and a half stone, I had a stomach ulcer and they put me on strong antidepressants. I had a mental breakdown,” she says.
With some compensation she was awarded after the accident (“Nothing like what I could have received”) she put down a deposit on a tiny flat. While her peers were “discovering clubs and designer clothes”, she started working where her parents were working at the time: Liverpool’s docks. “You check the containers when they come in off the ship and fill out reports. I remember I was so unwell that as soon as break time came I’d go to sleep. Afterwards I’d stay awake until lunchtime, then sleep again because I was on antidepressants and all that.”
DAVID LEIGH DODD
Later, after separating from her first boyfriend, she moved to America. She lived in Orange County, California, worked in telecoms, got married in the little white church in Las Vegas, and had her first daughter.
Through various corrective procedures her scarring has been vastly diminished — I can barely see it. She gained confidence after separating from her ex-husband, returning to the UK and hitting the gym. “I don’t know what came over me, but I was a single mum and I just felt more motivated, had more energy. And then with the Kate thing, it’s something that I just couldn’t say no to any more.” These days she lives with her two daughters, Elise, 13, and Anais, 8, and her partner of ten years, a music producer, in Ormskirk, about 13 miles north of Liverpool, “with my mum just down the road” — the dream.
I’m compelled to find out what looking so extremely like Kate Moss has taught her about a woman the artist Marc Quinn (who placed a giant gold effigy of Moss in the British Museum) termed “a cultural hallucination”. Herewith my findings. She’s uncynical about Moss’s recent pivot from club-going hedonist to meditating Chipping Norton capitalist with the launch of her Cosmoss wellness line (£125 for 100ml of Sacred Mist perfume — Ohnona hasn’t tried it). “I get it, I’m on that path too, trying to be a bit more zen as I get older,” she says.
Ohnona/Kate Moss in a Little Britain sketch
DAVID LEIGH DODD, PRESS ASSOCIATION
She thinks Moss has a good sense of humour (“Nobody I’ve met that’s ever had anything to do with her has a bad word to say about her”) and admires that Moss appears not to have gone in for drastic surgical interventions as she hits her half-century. “I think she’s such a good role model, that you can be unique and beautiful and you don’t have to conform,” as opposed to the overfilled vision of femininity that proliferates on Instagram. And no, Ohnona herself has never met Moss — and doesn’t know if she’d want to. “I have my own life, and I definitely don’t want to interfere with hers.” She jokes that the closest she got was a trip to Croydon “once, when I used to live in Brighton, and that’s because Croydon had the nearest branch of Ikea”.
Still affected by the trauma of her accident, Ohnona is prone to second-guessing the motivations of people who do a double-take as she goes about her business. “You have to understand, teenagers used to see me in the street and shout, ‘Scarface!’,” she explains. Now, if she’s addressed in public, it’s usually because someone wants to share how much they love Kate Moss.
The positivity of these interactions, she tells me, has been quietly transformative, and although she dismisses what she does as “just a little side line,” she says she owes Moss a profound debt of gratitude. “Without her, I honestly don’t think I would have snapped out of all the things that held me back after the accident. I was scared to fly, scared to travel, scared of what people thought of me. I was just so scared of life. For me to go from that to being able to travel alone, set an example to my kids and do all the things I’ve done — I think I need to thank Kate Moss for that. I genuinely do.”
