Cara Delevingne
She was the most successful model of the digital age, but away from the cameras, Cara Delevingne was a troubled young woman brought to the brink of suicide. Here, she opens up Stephanie Rafanelli about self-harm, sexuality and addiction
How her mother’s heroin addiction led to her own troubled life
Cara Delevingne is sandwiched between two cushions on a brown leather sofa, describing her latest project — surprisingly, a young adult novel
— and blinking back the tears as she recalls the exhumation of her painful teenage years required to write it. By this point, the interview in the office-cum-props cupboard of a photography studio in Hollywood has begun to feel more of an emotional exorcism, both of her own past and the empathic bond she feels with the teenage portion of her 40.6 million Instagram followers, to whom the book, Mirror, Mirror, is an offering.
“I still talk to this one girl on Instagram who was so close to taking her own life because both of her parents died of cancer a year apart,” she says. “I said [to her]: ‘Please listen to me when I say, ‘Don’t do it. Just walk away. I know exactly how you’re feeling. You’re standing at the f-ing edge, about to throw everything away. But what you don’t understand is that if you don’t throw it away, you can help others’. When I connect with people like that, I can honestly say, ‘I’ve been there’.”
In fact, she has been there twice. Most recently in 2014, when, at just 22 years old and having become the most obsessed-over model of the digital age — winning Model of the Year at the British Fashion Awards for the second time, and with Burberry, Chanel, Mulberry and Topshop campaigns under her belt — she found her career interrupted by a bout of severe depression. It was a recurrence of an earlier episode at the age of 15. Both brought her to the brink of suicide — but most of the world was too busy fetishising her eyebrows to notice.
That second episode was assuaged in part by writing songs and poetry during an emergency break in LA. “Writing came from that lost feeling.
“I think the added pressure of social media would have destroyed me. I was already on the verge of being destroyed anyway ”
That alone [feeling],” she admits. “Because at that moment in time you don’t know how else to light a candle in that dark place. But when you do, you let it pour out.” And so the idea of writing a novel slowly began to form in the back of her mind. “That’s how I realised that it might help others,” she muses, still emotional. Later, she adds: “If I don’t tell them [my followers] the truth about myself, then why the fuck am I here?”
Kittenish tomfoolery
I first met Delevingne in 2013 at the Cannes Film Festival, when she — then a world-famous model but acting freshman, having only appeared in one cameo role in Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina — tagged along with my group to a function held by a prominent designer. Back then, she was a charming, goofball Jean Shrimpton, all kittenish tomfoolery.
So it is strange to hear her now, just four years on and barely 25 years old, talk as a seasoned counsellor to Generation Z. Though, to be fair to Delevingne, she has devoured several lifetimes in that short period: since jumping horses from fashion to Hollywood she has already starred in a blockbuster (Suicide Squad); worked with some of the most revered actors and screenwriters in the industry, among them Dame Judi Dench and Sir Tom Stoppard (for Tulip Fever); played a female lead (in Paper
Towns); and she secured top spot in Hollywood Reporter’s chart of most popular actors (based on data from social-media websites) in August, having spent the summer touring red carpets for sci-fi adventure film
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, her head shaved and wearing futuristic silver creations.
Today, however, Delevingne looks more of a cross between Tank Girl and Edie Sedgwick, a cocktail of self-assertion and vulnerability, in a white vest top that exposes her tattoos. Without her old veil of blonde hair, she looks tougher, but feels more “exposed”, which is, she says, “liberating”. She shaved it off for her upcoming film
Life in a Year, in which she plays a teenage cancer patient. However, while she was on set in Toronto earlier this year, she began to feel the gloom descend. “It really put me back into a dark place,” she says. “I felt like a moody, hormonal teenager again. That’s probably when I thought about death the most.” What helped her was channelling her demons into Mirror, Mirror, which she worked on in her downtime, in conjunction with Hertfordshire-based novelist Rowan Coleman, with emails “flying back and forth across the Atlantic”. The nine-month co-writing process was, she says, life-altering.
It would be easy to be sceptical of Delevingne’s true input, but her publisher Anna Valentine, who has previously worked on books by Russell Brand and Justin Bieber, insists: “Cara had a very clear idea about the story she wanted to tell, and Rowan helped to bring [it] to life.”
For her first meeting with Coleman in November 2016, Delevingne turned up armed with poems she had written as a teenager, ideas for themes, embryonic characters and “nuggets” of the initial premise, which they teased into fuller storylines. “You’re trying to cram in all these puzzle pieces,” says Delevingne. “But what you need to do is take a step back. Tear it apart, but not throw anything away.”
She was firm that her first novel should not be set in the “fashion bubble”, but focus on the lives of ordinary teenagers. “I thought, let’s get down to the real shit, shall we?” Described as a “twisty coming-of-age story”,
Mirror, Mirror is dark and gritty (and, it should be said, sweary). Set in south London in a fast-paced world of Snapchat threads — all KKs and FFSs — it explores the effects of growing up in the digital age, something Delevingne feels fortunate to have narrowly missed out on. “I always felt as a teenager that everything I did was because I wanted someone to love me. I think the added pressure of social media would have destroyed me. I was already on the verge of being destroyed anyway.”
Privilege
Delevingne’s background is ostensibly one of extreme privilege. Born into the British haut monde, she grew up with her two older sisters, Chloe (now 32) and Poppy (31) in the wealthy London district of Belgravia. Their father, Charles Delevingne, a dashing “debs’ delight” turned property developer, is the grandson of Viscount Hamar Greenwood, the last Chief Secretary for Ireland, and his paternal aunt was infamous 1930s society girl Doris