Don’t expect Cara Delevingne to return to the runway any time soon. The “Paper Towns” star has now completed the long journey from the catwalk to the Hollywood red carpet, and she intends to keep her status as a model “former” forevermore for several reasons.
It’s not because she’s got mad beat-boxing and eyebrow-shaping skills which can pay the bills, so to speak; she also says she suffered a great deal of anxiety and body-shaming as a supermodel and felt subjected to “disgusting” poses in her early days in the business.
Speaking to London’s The Times (via People), Delevingne made it clear that she will “not [be] doing fashion work any more” — a move which many suspected to be the plan after she reportedly dropped her model management companyearlier this summer.
“Modelling just made me feel a bit hollow after a while,” Delevingne told the mag. “It didn’t make me grow at all as a human being. And I kind of forgot how young I was … I felt so old.”
Indeed, even though Delevingne just turned 23, she’d been working in the industry for a dozen years before she quit — and she paid the physical and emotional price for it, too.
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That stress eventually manifested into the development of severe psoriasis, a chronic, visible skin condition which made her feel even more isolated in the industry. “People would put on gloves and not want to touch me because they thought it was, like, leprosy or something.”
“I was, like, fight and flight for months. Just constantly on edge,” Cara further explained, adding that, similar to the body-shaming Miley Cyrus recently opened up about from her days as a youth thrust under a spotlight of extreme expectations, it was damaging to her self-esteem. “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,” said Delevingne.
Even though she’s now taken a final step away from the modeling biz for her own pursuits, she’s still got some love for the world of fashion. Today (Monday, August 17) she gave an Instagram shout out to Vogue Magazine for its “Forces of Fashion” feature, saying she was “so honored” to be included in the mix of fashion’s most powerful figures.
Even so, she still has trouble stomaching some of the things she’s experienced along the way in that line of work — especially what she felt were some overly salacious poses for her age at the time. “I am a bit of a feminist and it makes me feel sick. It’s horrible and it’s disgusting … [These are] young girls. You start when you are really young and you do, you get subjected to … not great stuff.”
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