By GUY TREBAY

　　It would probably require a stopwatch to clock the lag time between sin and redemption lately, as media disgrace is transformed into a bargaining chip in a celebrity’s career.

　　It was just over seven months ago, on September 15, that The Daily Mirror of London ran front page photographs that, it claimed, showed the model Kate Moss cutting and snorting cocaine in a London photo studio where Babyshambles, the band of her boyfriend, Pete Doherty, was recording.

　　The immediate effect on Ms. Moss’s career was less than promising. She was fired by a group of the clients who had made her one of the richest women in her industry, with estimated annual earnings of＄9 million.

　　The Swedish retailer H&M, Europe’s largest clothing chain, led the charge, dropping her from an advertising campaign showcasing clothes designed by Stella McCartney.

　　Yet a strange thing happened to Kate Moss on the way to rehab. Far from becoming a pariah, she developed an unexpected luster. She found herself that most nebulous of beings, the cultural avatar.

　　W magazine ran a cover story on Kate Moss in November 2005. Vanity Fair made her its cover subject the following month. An issue of the influential fashion magazine French Vogue was dedicated to Ms. Moss, who also served as guest editor.

　　If her notoriety was bad for the brand, it is hard to see how. By early 2006 she had booked campaigns with Virgin Mobile, Dior, Roberto Cavalli and CK Jeans. She had renewed her contracts with the leather and accessories company Longchamp and, it was rumored, also with Burberry, whose runway show in Milan she attended in February as the front-row guest of Rose Marie Bravo, the company’s chief executive.

　　“It shows how relevant she is,” Jenn Ramey, Ms. Moss’s American agent, said just days after Nikon introduced a new campaign for its Coolpix S6 digital camera built around a series of photographs of a mostly naked Ms. Moss.

　　For Anna Marie Bakker, the director of communications at Nikon, Ms. Moss seemed an obvious choice to promote a brand aggressively trying to seduce the notoriously fickle imaginations of young consumers. “Part of the appeal is that she is truly an enduring style icon,” Ms. Bakker said. “But most importantly, she appeals to Nikon as we try to move our product forward, because she has an edge.”

　　Doctoral dissertations could be written on the layered meanings of “edge,” the most overused marketing term of the last decade. Yet Kate Moss, whose cool has attracted the attention of artists from Lucien Freud to the British sculptor Marc Quinn, can now fairly be said to have added “edge” to her resume.

　　“Her image has a life of its own,” said Mr. Quinn, whose painted bronze sculpture of Ms. Moss, in an elaborate yoga posture and with her feet behind her ears, will be the centerpiece of a show opening in May Boone Gallery in New York.

　　Ms. Moss’s tabloid adventures added to the list of details that, wittingly or not, we all now seem to accumulate about celebrities. “And that, after all, is what a brand is,” said James Twitchell, an author and professor of English and advertising at the University of Florida.

　　“Celebrities are these extraordinary characters who have no plot, but who are in many ways the easiest characters to follow. They don’t violate expectations because there really are none.”

　　“Edge denotes shame,” explained Dr. Michael Brody, chairman of the media committee of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. “People use cameras to take all kinds of pictures now,” he added, alluding to the too-intimate images widely available on sites like Craigslist.com or MySpace.com. “If you’re selling a camera in our celebrity-obsessed culture, why not use a celebrity and one who was captured at the scene of a crime?” he said.

　　The idea is a shrewd exploitation of brand. “From the minute her name came up, we loved the idea of Kate endorsing a camera,” said Bill Oberlander, the executive creative director of McCann Worldwide, the agency that created the Nikon ads. What could be better, Mr. Oberlander said, than giving a camera to the woman who has spent her life as the focus of its gaze and letting her “take the lens and turn it on the audience?”