After the interview was released, the quote "immediately caused an uproar" according to the
BBC.
HuffPost wrote, "The roar that
WWD promised quickly materialised." Television presenter
Denise van Outen quipped, "Kate Moss is talking out of her size zero backside." Susan Ringwood, the chief executive of the eating disorder awareness charity
Beat, said, "For her to even inadvertently legitimise something that could be potentially so harmful is regrettable." Moss' representatives stated the quote was "taken out of context."
CBS News named the quote one of the "Top 20 quotes of 2009", while
Cosmopolitan included it in the
listicle "The Most Insane Things Celebs Said This Year".
Pro-anorexia mantra After the release of the interview, English model
Katie Green stated, "There are 1.1 million eating disorders in the UK alone. Kate Moss's comments are likely to cause many more. If you read any of the pro-anorexia websites, they go crazy for quotes like this." That community, also known as "
pro-ana", quickly started using the term and applied it as "
thinspo" and as one of their 10 mantras. The pro-ana website Starving for Control put the quote on their homepage. Author Lisabeth Kaeser recounted how she used the phrase as a personal mantra when she was struggling with her eating disorder. Writing for
HuffPost in 2018, Katie Bishop stated, "For years the slogan infiltrated pro-anorexia forums, and even today a quick Google offers up pages of images of the words in Instagram-ready fonts against tasteful backgrounds of millennial pink." In 2011, American custom apparel retailer
Zazzle listed a user-uploaded children's T-shirt design bearing the logo. After the
Advertising Standards Authority in the UK received complaints, the ASA required Zazzle to remove the advertisements featuring the shirts and censured the company. In 2014, Canadian clothing retailer
Hudson's Bay produced a shirt designed by
Christopher Lee Sauvé featuring the quote with a
nutrition label that listed the calorie count as 0. Customer Kathleen Pye saw the shirt in the store and posted a photo to Twitter, calling the shirt "unbelievably irresponsible". The company received an onslaught of criticism online, after which it announced it would pull the shirt from its stores and stop production. B&M pulled the product and announced "We have asked our supplier to withdraw this particular quotation" from the scales. In June 2017, Gemma Rose Cobb examined the phrase in her PhD dissertation for the
University of Sussex, titled
Critiquing the thin ideal in pro-anorexia online spaces.
Elle compared the saying with the quote "You can never be too rich or too thin" by
Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, as examples of "snappy one-liners" coming to define their speakers. In his 2019 book
First You Write a Sentence, social historian
Joe Moran dissects the quote and examines its language in depth. He writes that while it is a "dubious message", it is a "well-turned sentence". In her 2013 book
Digital Dieting, academic
Tara Brabazon writes that instead of obesity being a public crisis, "excessive ignorance" is much worse, which she states is "so clearly revealed by Kate Moss" and the quote. ==Retraction==