As 25th birthday parties go, it looks like a pretty good one. Donatella Versace hosted it in a basement club near the Ritz in Paris. Guests included Catherine Zeta-Jones and Liv Tyler. The birthday girl, fresh from the catwalk, wore a strapless dress with her hair braided in a ponytail, and there was a cake shaped like a diamond, so enormous she had to be lifted by fellow revellers to blow out the candles.
Kate Moss usually enforces a strict no-cameras rule at her parties, but in 1999 she let in Richard Young, a celebrity snapper much liked by many of the people he photographed (he spent extended periods with Freddie Mercury and Princess Diana). In terms of access and unbridled fun, he says, “the 1990s was really a good time to be around”.
Was this party a particularly wild one? “Well, anything that Kate Moss does is normally wild,” he says, “though this had certain restraints: if they had me there, then obviously they’re not going to go too crazy.” When things do get out of hand, he tends to back off “because I don’t really want to see all that stuff”.
This isn’t entirely borne out by Young’s back catalogue, which contains plenty of stars-behaving-badly photos: Keith Moon crouching wolflike on a Fiorucci dancefloor; Janice Dickinson revealing more of herself than perhaps intended to Rupert Everett.; restaurateur Peter Langan rolling backwards off chairs at his Mayfair brasserie. “Oh, Langan’s,” Young nods. “Well, yes, that was always raucous.”
A lot of the famous people Young photographed are dead now. He draws my attention to the man with the silver watch helping Moss into the air. “Do you know who that is? That’s Madonna’s brother [Christopher Ciccone]. Sadly he died a year ago. I haven’t got the foggiest idea how he came to be there and why he’s doing what he’s doing, but there he is, holding her up so she can reach the candles to blow them out.”