The light was perfect, and the water was so still and transparent. I think it had all of the right elements to create images lots of textures and beautiful, puffy clouds. My mom found us a cool little place to go and take a break. ”Kate and I went on vacation to Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands. I hung a white sheet up with clothes pins and took her portrait. It was in the backyard of a flat where I was lodging. You would have to ask her! I remember the first photograph I took of Kate. I’m not really sure what she thought of me that day. After the job I didn’t see her again for some time. “I first met Kate in 1991 in London on a modelling job that we were both doing. “I love you and thank you – Mario.” Here, he shares a few more of his memories. But, there were many more intimate and unseen shots of that trip that are now the focus of a new book, published by Phaidon, simply titled Kate. “This is for you, Kate,” he writes in the edition’s forward. Some of these photographs would go on to become the inspiration for the iconic Calvin Klein Obsession campaign. Sorrenti’s black and white film renders Moss in crisp chiaroscuro, either playing on a Game Boy in unbuttoned jeans or wrapping gauze round a cut on her foot, jokingly pouting at the camera in exaggerated pain. The candid nature of their relationship was extensively documented in 1993, during a trip that the pair took to the Virgin Islands.

Their union was the kind that is unique to the artist and their muse, but without artifice or pretence. “There are so many that I love.” Indeed, it was an all-consuming love that brought the young Moss and Sorrenti together, when they met in the early 1990s Moss was 17 at the time and Sorrenti just a few years her senior.

“It’s very hard to say,” the Naples-born fashion photographer writes, over an email exchange. When I ask Mario Sorrenti what his favourite image of Kate Moss might be, he finds it impossible to choose from the hundreds he has taken throughout the 25 years they have known one another.

Kate by Mario Sorrenti