What is KAWS’s piece called “Kate Moss With White Gloves (First Edition)”?

Summary

A KAWS print depicting the supermodel Kate Moss, reworked with his signature white cartoon gloves. The image brings KAWS's appropriation strategy to bear on a celebrity portrait, overlaying a fashion icon with the rounded, four-fingered gloves drawn from classic cartoon characters. Rendered as a bold, flat graphic with crisp outlines, the 'First Edition' print blends pop-portraiture with KAWS's recognizable visual codes. The white gloves transform a familiar figure of fashion and media culture into a hybrid of celebrity image and cartoon iconography, characteristic of how KAWS folds mass-culture sources into his own idiom.

Why It Matters

Kate Moss is one of the defining celebrity images of the late twentieth century, and KAWS's intervention links his practice to the lineage of Pop portraiture — Warhol's celebrity silkscreens chief among them — while filtering it through his own cartoon vocabulary. By adding the white gloves, KAWS marks the image as his while commenting on how thoroughly fashion, advertising, and entertainment imagery saturate culture. The work shows the breadth of his appropriation beyond cartoon mascots, extending into the world of celebrity and media that has always shaped his subject matter. For collectors, a celebrity-themed KAWS print is a distinctive holding that connects his street-art and graphic sensibility to the broader history of Pop art's fascination with fame. It demonstrates that KAWS's method — claiming a recognizable image and re-signing it through his motifs — applies as readily to a supermodel as to a cartoon character.

Collector Perspective

This print appeals to collectors who want a KAWS work outside the Companion and CHUM universe, especially those drawn to celebrity and Pop-portrait imagery. Its subject gives it crossover appeal among fashion and pop-culture collectors as well as KAWS specialists, and it stands out as a conversation piece within a collection dominated by his character-based works. As a bold graphic portrait it displays strikingly and can serve as a distinctive accent. Because it sits apart from his most common motifs, collectors should pay close attention to authentication, edition details, and condition, all of which drive value.

Historical Context

The work reflects KAWS's broad appropriation practice, which from his street-art beginnings drew on advertising, fashion, and entertainment imagery as well as cartoons. A Kate Moss portrait situates KAWS within the Pop-art tradition of celebrity image-making while marking the image with his cartoon gloves, a gesture that asserts authorship through recognizable motifs. It belongs to the editions side of his output, where he translates appropriated sources into accessible graphic prints. The piece illustrates how KAWS, having built a vocabulary on mascots like Companion and CHUM, could extend the same logic to the iconography of celebrity and fashion media.

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