Cara Delevingne gave a rare interview to British paper The Guardian, which was published on Sunday. She talks about fame, fans, and paparazzi, but also the modelling industry — it’s advantages and detractions.
Here are our highlights:
I suspect this is one reason why people seem to like Delevingne so much: she’s so dismissive of the fashion world that made her famous. You might reasonably point out that someone born into wealth can afford to be dismissive of their job. Even so, it’s an industry that holds itself in such po-faced high regard that it’s hard not to warm to someone at the centre of it who implies that she thinks it’s sorely lacking. If her daughter wanted to become a model, she says: «I’d say no, if that’s all she aspired to. You know, I get a lot of girls who say, I just want to be a model so badly. And I think: you can do better than that. I mean, look, I do love it, I’m not saying anything bad about it, I just think you can do a lot more. I was incredibly lucky to do as well as I’ve done, it’s not easy, there’s so many models go through so much shit, and it’s just, if you have a brain, which everyone does, use it and try and do something else.»
She says she only became a model in the first place to earn money to put herself through drama school: despite the fact that she still lives with them, she claims her parents stopped supporting her financially when she was 16. When she first started modelling, she carried a video camera around with her, to record «all the weird parts of it». «You’re looked through, you’re not looked at, you are treated as a kind of mannequin. I got a tattoo saying Made in England above my foot to represent that, that I felt like a doll for so long. Because you are just a kind of puppet, you know, entertainment. You kind of feel that you need to have no soul really, to do that job, a little bit. But then it gets better and people actually want to hear your opinion and it’s the most shocking thing in the world when that happens. It all changes: ‘You used to treat me like shit and now you suck up to me.'»
Still, she says, modelling got her into acting, «so I can’t complain».
