En route to Berlin for her first performance, quite literally midair, Cara Delevingne developed a tooth infection that required an emergency root canal. The first show of a debut album is nerve-wracking under any circumstances, and this one arrived with a swollen face and real pain. “The first show ever, my face was super swollen and blown up, and I was just in a lot of pain,” she recounts, “but that is the magic of performance, adrenaline, and everything else. It just all melted away. And for that 30 minutes of performing my first show, I was in heaven.”
Delevingne is just 34, but the album marks her third wholesale career reinvention. She began modeling at 17, quickly becoming one of the industry’s most ubiquitous faces, before pivoting to acting and now to music. For this iteration, she has deliberately pared everything back.
“I imagined so many ways in which I could have ventured into music, and it would’ve been to do this very hyperpop high-fashion thing, and that’s just not me,” she says. The wardrobe leans toward tank tops and jeans rather than gowns or bedazzled bodysuits, and she has kept a stunt harness from one of her music videos for a number of performances simply because it looks cool. “It’s the most stripped-down version of me. In my head, I was like, I just want to feel naked up there, because that’s what it is,” she says, adding that she strives to separate herself from fashion because it is something she does, not who she is.
That instinct traces back to her modeling years. During the Tumblr era of the 2010s, photos of her pulling silly faces at Victoria’s Secret and Chanel shows spread widely, even though she never had her own account. She was not afraid to be goofy and to crack high fashion’s serious veneer, setting a precedent for later supermodels such as Alex Consani. “I didn’t think about it too much,” she reflects. “I wasn’t contrived. I wasn’t trying to plan how this was going to be perceived.”
Acting offered a way to tell more robust stories and to be more than a face. She took her first leading role in the 2015 film Paper Towns, played the antagonist in 2016’s Suicide Squad, and this year stars in Jordan Firstman’s critically praised Club Kid. Not every project scratched the same itch, she admits, describing a mix of horrible and rewarding experiences along the way.
Music, by her account, is the most exposed she has allowed herself to be. Fresh from a promotional shoot slotted between the European and American legs of a mini tour, she describes the debut as the point where the performance and the person finally line up, on her own terms rather than the industry’s.
