Model Kate Moss's clothing line to stir London sale frenzy

Security guards, stampedes and catfights over pairs of skinny jeans await British shoppers battling for a piece of this year's hottest clothing collection, designed by supermodel Kate Moss for a British apparel chain.

Fashionistas will likely queue for hours at the flagship store of the Topshop group in London's Oxford Street before the official launch Tuesday of a range which has received near-blanket media coverage here since it was announced last September.
The range, which Moss helped to design, features pieces costing between 10 and 200 pounds (15 and 293 euros, 20 and 400 dollars) and will be on sale at 300 stores in Britain, as well at Barneys in the United States, Colette in Paris and Corso Como in Milan, Italy.
Moss is not the first star to put her name to high street clothes -- Madonna endorsed a range for Sweden's H and M, David Beckham helped to design for Marks and Spencer and pop star Lily Allen's New Look range is out soon.
But some of these have proved more successful than others -- the Beckham tie-in received a lukewarm reception, while by contrast, analysts attributed a 17 percent increase in H and M's March sales to Madonna.

This suggests that, despite the British public's voracious interest in celebrities, retailers cannot rely on recruiting just any star to endorse their goods -- there must be a convincing "fit" between the product and the face.
PR experts say the massive interest in the Moss range came about partly because shoppers find it easy to believe that she herself would wear clothes from the chain.
"The thing about Kate Moss is that she has been seen in stuff she's bought in thrift shops and vintage," Sally Sykes, a board member at the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, told AFP.
"The point about good PR is that it does have to be grounded in reality."
Despite the apparently strong match between model and brand, the retail chain did take a calculated risk in signing up Moss, who often attracts disapproving headlines in the British press.
Nicknamed "Cocaine Kate" by the tabloid media after photographs of her apparently taking the drug emerged in 2005, she has been widely criticised for her relationship with troubled pop singer Pete Doherty, a recovering drug addict.

Her modelling career seems unaffected by such claims, though -- a situation underlined by her appearance on the front of British Vogue in March modelling a 55-pound black lame minidress.
Graham Hales, of branding consultancy Interbrand, said that Moss's ability to emerge unscarred from controversy could actually have made her a more appealing figure to shoppers.
"She's ridden these cycles and she's been through tests. The whole nature of celebrity requires them to stay in the public eye but the difficulty is that people can disengage from that," he said.
While Topshop looks set to benefit from its involvement with Moss, Moss will also likely reap the rewards of working with the group, he added.
"They're such uber-celebrities that they almost want to demonstrate that they're still in touch with the average man, woman or girl on the street so to a degree it restores their credibility," he said,
Moss could also use the tie-in to open up other design opportunities for herself, Hales predicted.

And with Allen launching her New Look range and Australian singer Kylie Minogue fronting a swimwear range for H and M in May, the high streets will be dominated by more celebrity tie-ins in coming months.
Far from instilling a "fame fatigue", though, experts say that the more stores that use starpower to sell their wares, the more persuasive the endorsements will become.
"Given all the noise of these marketing pitches, the clarity of the message becomes vastly more important than in the past," said Richard Hyman, managing director of Verdict, a retail consultancy.
"You need to have a very focused message that gets across very quickly and I would say that celebrities are the fulcrum of that."