CARA DELEVINGNE

also Amy [Blakemore], who took time to write a book of poetry. It won the Melita Hume Poetry Prize. We don’t ostracise models for doing other work, we celebrate it.’

Maybe model denying is part of the backlash against the mad pace of technology. Cara et al certainly seem to believe that the grass will be more meaningful on the other side of the runway. But there’s more to it than that and Lily Cole sums it up. She first made headlines as the 14-year-old doll-faced redhead working the catwalks for Gaultier, Galliano and Chanel. But then she got a First from Cambridge and last year I found myself following the then 25-year-old around the Amazonian rainforest while she talked about exchange paradigms and global capitalism as she started a project to make jewellery out of wild rubber harvested from the forest to help local families.

Models are supposed to put clothes on, look good in them and encourage you to buy them, not advise you against smart designer goods. But the credit crunch has shaken our confidence in bottomless capitalism, making being a model embarrassing or untenable.

Fashion photographer Amelia Troubridge believes that being a spanner in the works is a good commercial move. ‘The luxury industry today has a huge amount of power and it’s looking for substance,’ she says, referring to Cara whom she photographed last year during the making of Michael Winterbottom’s The Face of an Angel, in which Cara stars. ‘Cara wants to be an actress. She’s a beautiful, honest, tomboy oddball and that’s why she’s landed major campaigns.’ Delevingne recently appeared in Timeless on Sky Arts, is i n the upcoming film adaptation of Martin Amis’ London Fields and will soon star in the period drama Tulip Fever. Other models with acting aspirations include the androgynous beauty Andrej Pejic, who has just been cast in Sofia Coppola’s The Little Mermaid, and Cole who, alongside running the social giving network impossible.com, co- owning a recycled knitting company and a bookshop on Charing Cross Road, Claire de Rouen, is playing Helen of Troy at Shakespeare’s Globe.

If the 1990s supers dedicated themselves to having a good time while getting a book ghostwritten or putting their name to a clothing line, today’s model deniers beaver away backstage sending pictures, composing tweets, making sure their million-plus fans are kept happy and working hard on other projects that better reflect their sense of self.

Perhaps Cara puts it best, describing herself on Twitter as a ‘professional human being’. And with £1 million in the bank, a very successful human being she is, too. ES

Actress