At the end of last year, two pairs of Hunter wellies were mounted on plinths and installed at the Barbican – part of the exhibition Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion. One came from the wardrobe of Kate Moss, the other belonged to the late Queen Elizabeth II. With all due respect to Her Majesty (and the archive Vivienne Westwood and Issey Miyake pieces that were also on display), the supermodel’s muddy boots were the star attraction. Though the Queen’s 1960s wellies spoke to the history of the British brand – which has been keeping blue-blooded feet dry since the middle of the 19th century – Kate’s rubber rain boots, with their dried-on crust of ancient Somerset soil, were emblematic of an era-defining moment in post-millennium pop culture.
“We didn’t have time to go shopping,” Moss says now of what led her to that seminal Glastonbury look in 2005, the year her then boyfriend, Pete Doherty, played the Other Stage with his band Babyshambles. During her rush to leave the house and get to the festival, a friend called to warn her to pack wellies because of the mud. “We were already running late, and my boyfriend at the time was performing that afternoon… Panic!” Or at least, it was until she remembered the trusty Hunter boots lurking at the back of her wardrobe. “They were perfect,” says Kate. “Black, and I didn’t look like a farmer.”
Of course, Moss was never in danger of being mistaken for a Clarkson type, especially given the other clothes she threw in the car all those years ago: skinny waistcoats and houndstooth hot pants and gold lurex minidresses, which she accessorised with studded bags and low-slung belts, a packet of fags and yes, those increasingly filthy wellies. Pap shots of the super wafting around Worthy Farm in this faintly shambolic, impossibly glamorous festival wardrobe prompted hundreds of thousands of women to purchase Hunter boots of their own. So when did Kate realise she had set something significant in motion? “I guess when I went to the next festival and saw everyone wearing them,” she shrugs. Moss, it seems, spent about as much time dwelling on how influential her outfits became as she did putting them together in the first place.
Hunter, by contrast, has never lost sight of her impact – hence why, when it came to the question of who would star in the brand’s 170th anniversary campaign, there was only ever one choice. Photographed by Mikael Jansson in appropriately bucolic British surroundings, the shoot finds Kate back in the brand’s Original Tall Wellington Boot, teamed with a flannel shirt, a hooded parka and those signature hot pants.
Though she insists “my shorts wouldn’t be so short now” if she were festival-bound tomorrow (we remain unconvinced), eternal muso Moss will likely pop up in the VIP area when Glasto returns after its fallow year next summer – and it’s safe to assume she’ll have her Hunters with her. Because Kate, who has always been as revered for her innate personal style as any of her chameleonic appearances on runways or billboards over the past 30 years, famously sticks to what she likes. “Lots of things I wear today I’ve had for years,” she agrees. “A Galliano slip dress, army jackets, waistcoats, pirate boots, my Balenciaga leather jacket, a bias skirt from Junya Watanabe… I’ve always kept the pieces I love.” Muddy wellies included.