Mario Testino Captures Wedding Of Kate Moss And Jamie Hince In Vogue September 2011

I have a confession to make. In the beginning, I did not understand the Kate Moss phenomenon. Call me old-fashioned, but after a decade of Amazonian supermodels pulsing with glamorous, bosomy life, I simply didn’t understand the Piaf-bodied waif with the wan, faraway look in her eyes, nor the Corinne Day and Nigel Shafran photographs that set her adrift in bleak welfare apartments or on gray English beaches.

And then I saw her across a crowded room at a fashion party in Notting Hill, and I was stopped dead in my tracks by her laughing beauty and preternatural elegance. (“I never did a hairy armpit,” says Kate firmly of those late-eighties grunge moments. “You can look dirty, but you can’t be dirty!”) The simple fact is that Kate is irresistible. There is vulnerability and there is strength, and when she turns on the klieg light of her flirtatious, giggly life force, it is impossible not to fall just a little bit in love. And Kate’s conquests are legion. A pantheon of illustrious cultural figures who define our age have fallen under her spell—including designers John Galliano, Marc Jacobs, Gianni Versace, and Dame Vivienne Westwood; photographers Mario Testino, Annie Leibovitz, and François-­Marie Banier; and artists Marc Quinn, Banksy, and Lucian Freud—not to mention a slew of high-profile paramours who have run the gamut from the courtly and urbane to the mad, bad, and frankly dangerous to know.

But how do you catch a cloud and pin it down? Who would, in the words of David Tang, Kate’s wedding-day master of ceremonies, succeed in “persuading not the most easily persuadable girl to marry him”?

Enter Jamie Hince, the 42-year-old guitarist of the critically acclaimed rock band the Kills. “I’ve met them all throughout the years,” says Testino, “but he is the most real. He has a great sense of humor.”

“And style,” adds Vogue Contributing Editor Camilla Nickerson. “And he’s sweet and tender, very loving.”

Continue to read more and see slideshow at Vogue.com.