Cara and the truth about sex harassment in the fashion industry

Key facts you need to know about this particular model: she’s the one with the dark, unplucked eyebrows, which, if you follow such things, spearheaded a trend for thick, brushy brows. She is connected, as in her granny was a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret, her godmother is Joan Collins, and she is best friends with Rihanna and Taylor Swift.

Delevingne’s big break was landing the Burberry campaign in 2011, Burberry being the brand that, with the help of Mario Testino, has a reputation for picking models with the elusive It factor. You may remember her naked under her trenchcoat, coltish legs wrapped around a faintly intimidated-looking Eddie Redmayne. Since then, she’s made it her mission to put the fun into fashion – or at least not to present an idealised version of her life to the ever watchful public.

While other models upload pictures of themselves to Instagram looking cute in yoga kit, Delevingne’s signature is goofing about, tongue lolling, doing the double thumbs up while wearing whacky clothes – hamburger slippers and crazy sunglasses – often in the company of her glamorous friends (a recent picture of Delevingne and Taylor Swift got one million likes on Instagram).

Her other speciality is cheeky vines (short videos), including a recent one of paparazzi chasing her in a golf buggy with the caption, “Run paps!!! RUNNNNNN.” This irreverent, inclusive kind of model posing never existed before Delevingne and it has endeared her to a young audience who believe her to be a rare, genuine presence in the celebrity pantheon.

She eats pizza, she wears onesies, she gets crazy tattoos (a lion’s head on her forefinger), she doesn’t seem to be remotely up herself, and yet everything about her life is memorable and glamorous. All of which translates into a massive social media presence – 17 million Instagram followers plus 3.41 million Twitter followers. These are the kind of numbers A-list actresses can only dream of. To put it in perspective, Gwyneth Paltrow and Amanda Seyfried have a mere 1.1 million Instagram followers each. Jennifer Lawrence, the second highest paid actress in the world, has 359,000 followers on Twitter and 81,800 on Instagram.

Delevingne’s first starring role in a film is the reason why we are here in a room on the fifth floor of Claridge’s, observed by an entourage of PRs and assistants. It’s a pretty big deal – the launch of her acting career, no less (she had a walk-on part in Anna Karenina but no actual lines) – so it doesn’t seem like the best time to be burning her bridges with the industry that has put her on the map.

Delevingne, who is heavily made-up and dressed in expensive rock-chick-style skin-tight black trousers, black Saint Laurent jacket and star-spangled shirt, appears to have other ideas. “I like beauty,” she says in a soft, slightly husky voice. “I have an appreciation of fashion. But beauty, what does it mean? If you feel horrible on the inside you are ugly.”

I get the impression she is not at home in her designer finery and that she would be more comfortable with her feet up on the table, or her knees gripped under her chin. She’s definitely a beer-from-the-bottle girl, rather than a champagne sipper. She says she’s never really felt like a model. “I like fashion, but …” she waves a tattooed hand in the air. “I am a tomboy. I don’t really like heels or make-up.”

Almost from the get-go, she suffered from psoriasis. “I was working too much,” she says. “I didn’t say no to anything, and that is obviously my own fault, but …” One legendary eyebrow floats upwards. “People should have stopped me at some point.”

It got so bad, I’d heard, that backstage at one of the shows they were painting her body with foundation before sending her down the catwalk.

“It wasn’t just one show. It was every single show. People would put on gloves and not want to touch me because they thought it was, like, leprosy or something.”

Still, she was the hot girl of the moment.

“It wasn’t a good time,” she says quietly. “I was, like, fight and flight for months. Just constantly on edge. It is a mental thing as well because if you hate yourself and your body and the way you look, it just gets worse and worse.”

When I suggest the endless late nights and hell-for-leather partying, for which she is renowned (famously she dropped what looked very much like a bag of cocaine on her doorstep in front of photographers in 2013), can’t have helped much, she looks hurt.

“No, because at that point I wasn’t going out. I wasn’t allowed to – I was on such strong medication,” she says.

So far there isn’t much evidence of the mischievous Cara Delevingne. She’s friendly and chipper and bright-eyed, but there’s no sign of the gurning, and the tongue hasn’t made a single appearance. If anything, I am getting the faintest whiff of buried sadness.

Or maybe she’s just tired. She has every reason to be. There was, even if she took a break from it, a great deal of partying, a lot of larking about in animal onesies or denim shorts, hightops and beanies, arm in arm with Rihanna or Rita Ora or Michelle Rodriguez (her girlfriend for a while) and, thanks to the gossip columns, we long ago formed an impression of a young girl living life way too fast. I confess she was top of the list of people I was expecting to crash any day.

“Well, I do keep going until I run into a wall, which is something I am learning not to do,” she says, half apologetically. Did she actually hit a wall? “It felt like a wall to me, but then I feel like the wall is death.” She squirms in her seat, laughs a nervous, croaky laugh. “That sounds terrible, I know. It sounds really bad, doesn’t it?” A few days later I read in the July issue of American Vogue that, by the time she took a rest from modelling, she was having suicidal thoughts.

It sounds as if she has the people-pleaser gene and, in common with a lot of teenage girls, felt responsible for keeping other people happy. Kate Moss, the model she is most often compared to, has admitted that, at the start of her career, she was frequently traumatised by the things she was asked to do – the nudity, the sexually suggestive poses – yet it never occurred to her that she could say no.

Delevingne glowers. “I am a bit of a feminist and it makes me feel sick,” she says. “It’s horrible and it’s disgusting. [We’re talking about] young girls. You start when you are really young and you do, you get subjected to … not great stuff.”

She’s on a roll now, eyes wide and intense. “As time went on, I got to say no to things I couldn’t say no to before. But, especially when I was younger, you feel like if you don’t go along with what people say, then you will fail, you won’t get a job.” Or be branded difficult to work with? “Yes, which is not true, and people shouldn’t feel that.”

Pervy, male photographers and their creepy enabler stylists are one of fashion’s dirty little secrets. Years back, Delevingne got a Made in England tattoo, a reference, she says, to the fact that she felt she was being treated like a living doll. But she doesn’t expect much to change in her new line of work.

“I think you get that [sexual harassment] in every industry,” she says flatly. “I don’t think it’s just modelling, although I think it’s worse in modelling. There are male photographers who go into it purely because of the girls. But in every industry, if you are pretty, or someone likes the look of you …” She gives a rueful, lopsided smile. “It’s not good.”

Hang on. Has she experienced the casting couch herself? She looks away. Around the edges of the room where the entourage are propped against the walls, you can almost hear the collective intake of breath.

“A little, yeah,” she falls silent for a moment.

“I honestly thought going into acting there wouldn’t be any of that, but yeah.”

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Delevingne, as is her way, instantly tries to make it OK, lighten the mood. “I am very good at standing up for myself now, and for other people. If there is injustice I will flip out. If someone is crossing a line, they will know about it and so will everyone else. I’m not about brushing things under the carpet, you know what I mean?”

It’s quite hard to get a handle on Cara Delevingne. She seems world-weary and sophisticated at times, and at others puppyish and a bit all over the place. She is gorgeous, vivacious, and yet – despite the smoky, purple eye make-up and the on-show bra – she’s not really sexy. Beautiful in a feline way, like a foxier Jean Shrimpton, and spectacularly leggy, but somehow switched off. It’s almost like she chooses to deflect all that by being a little bit of a tykey kid, slipping into a Groucho Marx accent, or laughing her raspy laugh.

I tell her she seems lacking in vanity.

“Oh, I think everyone has a bit of narcissism about them. But, yeah, even when I was doing a shoot, every ten pictures or so I would have to do something stupid to make me feel less like an idiot. For me, it was always about playing a part.”

She doesn’t want to be the most gorgeous girl in the room. I think she wants to be the loved one. The attention is what has always driven her, being centre stage, in whatever capacity. Maybe it’s her defence mechanism. She comes from a big, connected, super-social Chelsea family – her father is a property developer, her mother was a socialite and is now a part-time personal shopper, rumoured to help the Duchess of Cambridge, and her grandfather was Sir Jocelyn Stevens, former publisher and chairman of English Heritage.

As well as Joan Collins, Delevingne’s godparents include the Condé Nast executive Nicholas Coleridge, and one of her older sisters, Poppy, is also a model. It’s fair to say she is used to mixing with the rich and the racy, and the out of control.

We’re not talking the safe circles of Sloanedom here. Her mother, Pandora, was a heroin addict and her relapsing addiction may have been the defining fact of Delevingne’s childhood. She told American Vogue recently: “It shapes the childhood of every kid whose parent has an addiction. You grow up too quickly because you’re parenting your parents.”

By 15 it had all become too much for her.

“I was hit with a massive wave of depression and anxiety and self-hatred, where the feelings were so painful that I would slam my head against a tree to try to knock myself out,” she said. By way of a cure she was prescribed a cocktail of psychotropic drugs and sent to the progressive co-ed “totally hippie dippy” Bedales, where she spent a lot of time playing the drums and seeing therapists.

So it’s not really surprising, given this background, that Delevingne has made the transition from model to actress. What is surprising, however, is how good she is. I was expecting average. Probably worth the risk because of her gigantic young-adult fanbase. But she’s good in Paper Towns, and her American accent is convincing.

What’s also surprising is the calibre of the films she’s in. On the horizon are Mandela director Justin Chadwick’s 17th-century romance Tulip Fever, which also stars Judi Dench; Mathew Cullen’s adaptation of Martin Amis’s London Fields, in which she stars alongside Johnny Depp; Chris Foggin’s Kids in Love; and Pan, an ensemble piece with Rooney Mara and Amanda Seyfried.

She’s also filming Suicide Squad with Will Smith and Jared Leto. I tell her I’m impressed by the names she is associated with because I wasn’t expecting her acting to be more than OK. “Oh, that’s so sweet!” she coos, pleased. “Low expectations is what I’m after. Honestly.”

This big launch year has been a long time in the planning, and she is proud, she says, to have held her nerve and waited for the right parts. It’s important to her that she is taken seriously from the off and that she’s playing roles young women can relate to. How does Hollywood get it wrong, in her opinion?

“The majority of writers and directors are men,” she grins. Apparently, she is not one to hold back when she thinks a character’s voice is inauthentic. “It’s the worst. It makes me so angry. Especially when it’s, like, male writers and you know a girl would never say that, and it sounds completely ridiculous. But I really think the movie industry is coming around. All the roles I have played are extremely strong female characters and I am really pushing for that.”

Those six years in modelling may turn out to have been the ideal preparation for her new career. She may be “terrified” of auditions, but intimidated by stars, schedules, time spent away from home, living out of a suitcase, lecherous directors, not so much.

“I have crocodile skin now,” she says. “I have been rubbed into the floor a lot.” She lurches towards the table and demonstrates a brisk rubbing action. “I am a lot harder than I was and I feel like all of that modelling, life, rejection, everything was preparation for this, and now that I am doing this I am the happiest person in the whole world.”

Rather sweetly, like her friend Taylor Swift, who regularly meets up with groups of her followers on social media, Delevingne feels a genuine responsibility to her young fans, some of whom have become friends.

“Not long ago I was having tea with a bunch of them downstairs [at Claridge’s] during Fashion Week. It’s funny because I had a really tough time as a teenager and I think lots of people do, and now I am fortunate enough that they tell me their problems.”

She doesn’t pretend to be qualified to give advice. “I tell them they have to find someone to talk to,” but there’s no denying she has first-hand experience of several of the issues that tend to come up. “It’s hard being a teenager,” she shrugs. “But I feel like the teens I speak to now are so confused. They don’t know what to feel or how to feel, and it scares me in a way because they get so obsessed with people.”

People like Cara Delevingne, for example? “Well …” She looks embarrassed. “I strive to make them interested in lots of other people. And as a model I was like, ‘Don’t look up to me. Find other cool things. There is so much more!’ ” A recent Instagram post reads: “I was born to be real, not to be perfect.”

This is a big part of what makes Delevingne such a marketable, relatable commodity. She’s beautiful and privileged, but she’s had it tough. She’s a seen-it-all sophisticate and a damaged kid who says she has been hurt most by women, “starting with my mother”. She is confused, uncertain about what she wants, like most young women.

Sexually she’s a bit of everything, maybe (she’s been linked to Harry Styles and several women, including her current girlfriend, the American indie musician Annie Clark, better known as St Vincent). She accepted that she was gay at 20, and has spoken about being in love with Clark, but she also says she is attracted to men, has erotic dreams “only about men”, and can imagine marrying a man and having kids. It’s all mixed up, genuine, extremely modern and very good for business.

She got burned recently in an awkward live TV interview on Good Day Sacramento, which proved that British sarcasm doesn’t always translate. Afterwards, she took to Twitter to defend herself, and the Paper Towns author John Green suggested it was sexist of the hosts to ask Delevingne if she had read the book.

So who looks after her? Her girlfriend, probably, who is ten years older. Her London friends, who have known her since school (“They tell me if I have changed or knock me off my horse a bit, if I am on one at all”). And her celebrity family – Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Rita Ora, the model Suki Waterhouse, and co. “Those guys! If I hadn’t met them I would be the loneliest sod in the world. It’s so great being able to talk to someone who understands.”

I really hope acting is the answer. Delevingne certainly thinks it is. “I have regained respect for myself, in a weird way, and on a movie set is where I feel like I belong. If that makes any sense.”

It does. Delevingne has been playing a part for as long as she can remember. In Paper Towns she plays a reluctant goddess, the girl onto whom everyone, male and female, projects their fantasies. What could be more appropriate?

Paper Towns is in cinemas on August 17