BA lost Kate Moss's bags containing new Top Shop designs
By Stephen Martin, sundaymirror.co.uk 13/04/2008
Kate Moss has discovered that NO-ONE is safe from the curse of BA's Terminal 5.
The supermodel had just arrived in Los Angeles to learn that the bungling airline had lost her luggage - including a top-secret new range of her Topshop clothing she had been carrying for photoshoots in the States.
Looking at first furious and then distraught, Kate was immediately surrounded by a scrum of airport security staff after EIGHT of her suitcases vanished in the Heathrow luggage fiasco.
But while ordinary passengers were left bagless and out-of-pocket, panicking BA made an instant compensation payment of £10,000 to the multimillionaire model.
The payment was authorised by BA chief executive Willie Walsh who put two of his most senior staff in charge of finding the bags. Kate's Louis Vuitton cases - worth around £3,000 each and containing prototypes of her yet-to-be revealed autumn-winter range of clothing for Topshop - disappeared when she flew to LA to do modelling shoots for the autumn collection.
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Arriving first-class with her five-year-old daughter Lila Grace, she sat with her head in her hands on realising the bags were among the 20,000 cases lost at Terminal 5.
Kate then enlisted the help of Topshop's billionaire owner Sir Philip Green, who phoned BA chairman Martin Broughton on her behalf. Sir Philip's spokeswoman said he offered BA use of his lorries to distribute passengers' piled-up bags.
A showbiz source said: "Kate was caught up in the appalling scenes at T5 and just like thousands of other people experienced first hand the incompetence of BA. But unlike the rest of us, BA staff were fawning all over her. They paid £10,000 right away."
Kate's clothing has been a runaway success for Topshop and is sold in 21 countries around the world. She launched her first range in May last year and the company estimate she boosted sales by 10 per cent - earning herself £3million and raking in tens of millions of pounds extra for them.
An insider said that losing the autumn range prototypes could be commercially devastating if the bags full of clothes fell into the wrong hands.
Fortunately six of the eight cases were eventually found and Kate is due back in London tomorrow after a two-week stay in the States. Whether the rest of her missing luggage ever makes it back is another matter...