I first met the model, musician and actress Cara Delevingne at her aunt’s wedding in 2001. I remember the cute blonde bridesmaid with short hair galloping around her grandmother’s house in her white silk dress, laughing and making faces at the grown-ups, her huge blue eyes full of mischief. “You know I got drunk that day,” she says. “I was eight, what a crazy age to get drunk.”
We are sitting on the sofa of her rented Knightsbridge apartment. I say sitting, Delevingne is lying down like a contented little cat, with Alfie, her chihuahua terrier, by her side. It’s daylight outside but the curtains are drawn. She rearranges herself and looks up at the ceiling. Despite now being nearly 32, she still has an innately childlike quality to her: the way she comically waddles off like a gangly teenager when she pops to the loo, how she repeatedly squeaks out her girlfriend Leah’s name (she is in another room, they have been together for two years) in a sing-song voice. I also love that she has dressed down in a tiny pair of workout shorts and a green hoodie, with the word “Attenborough” on the front. Her long hair is held back with a large, black elasticated headband and her face is make-up-free. Your skin looks amazing, I tell her. “It’s not,” she says, yawning sleepily. Her assistant and close friend, Ashley, sitting nearby at her computer, affectionately rolls her eyes.
It is approaching two years since a photographer filmed Delevingne outside the Van Nuys airport in Los Angeles, wandering around in her socks. She had just left the Burning Man festival and was travelling to a job in London. The images went viral. She entered rehab not long after and has been sober ever since.
How does she now feel about those pictures being blasted across the world? “It was a stupid decision to go straight from a festival to work. I should have waited a day. But it was going to happen to me anyway, there were plenty of photos out there of me looking wasted.” She says she doesn’t blame anyone apart from herself for what happened. “Listen, I signed up for this, this is my job, it’s what I do. But without that would I be sober now? I would have never been Sally Bowles in the West End, I’m super proud of that,” she says of her recently completed, critically acclaimed, 12-week run playing the lead in Cabaret.
We are meeting to talk about a project close to her heart: the alcohol-free sparkling rosé Della Vite Zero, which she has recently launched with her two older sisters, Chloe, 40, and Poppy, 38 (she jokingly refers to them as Thing One and Thing Two), and with whom she founded the high-end prosecco brand in 2018.
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“I didn’t want to do this because I’m now sober,” she says ,“but because I wanted an alternative.” She doesn’t mean to alcohol specifically, although of course that was behind it too, but because since she has become sober, she has struggled to find a nonalcoholic drink that isn’t full of sugar and high in calories. “I’d go out to dinner and drink seven ginger beers. I’d get a sugar hangover and a headache. It’s so stupid because you still end up feeling like shit. I wanted people like me to have a choice.”
A bottle is opened and I try a sip. Then a bit more. I end up drinking a few glasses. It tastes surprisingly good and has that sharpness of taste you normally associate with alcohol. I swipe a bottle to take home with me.
Delevingne was somehow born to become famous. I always had a sense she would be. The photographer Bruce Weber cast her in a Vogue Italia shoot at the age of ten. Her big break came when she appeared on the Burberry catwalk in 2011 — numerous campaigns for Saint Laurent, Dior, Calvin Klein and Chanel, among many others, followed. Karl Lagerfeld adored her, often closing shows with her walking by his side, and she is now a prime fixture at the Met Gala. However, it’s not only her beauty or her acting skills (she has appeared in several films including Suicide Squad and Paper Towns, as well as TV shows such as Carnival Row and Only Murders in the Building) but also her outspokenness, her relationships and friendships (Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez and Margot Robbie are in her gang) and her partying that have always attracted the sort of attention that made her a household name (with 41.5 million Instagram followers) and gave the press a field day.
We talk about her partying years and how she lived in a vacuum after becoming famous. “I used to think drugs and alcohol helped me cope … but they didn’t, they kept me sad and super depressed. I feel like I’ve got my power back and I’m not being controlled by other things,” she says.
Does it feel uncomfortable now being with people who drink, and does she go out less? “I love being around people who are drinking, it doesn’t mess me up,” she immediately answers. “I’ve done more in the past two years than I ever have: Glastonbury, Burning Man and Coachella.” I ask her what it was like doing Glastonbury sober. “It smelt bad, my feet hurt and I didn’t stay up so late, but it was just as much fun. I never want my life to change in that way.”
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She has spoken in the past about her mental health and how she struggled with it growing up. Her mother (the society beauty Pandora Delevingne) suffered her own addiction issues. Has becoming sober changed Cara’s relationship with her mother, has it given her more insight into what her mother must have gone through? “I do think the older I get, the more I see how similar me and my mother are. She has managed to survive through so much. She’s whip smart. I think there are really beautiful things about my mother and really sad things too. It makes the whole situation complex. When I was younger I talked about it freely because I didn’t really understand it. But it affected me, so I felt like it was my right to talk about it. I feel bad about that.”
What was her experience of rehab? Does she follow the 12 steps? “I like meetings, I go to them when I can. Some people would say I don’t go to them enough. But I’m doing it my way and it’s working for me. Everyone’s different,” she says, her words now more measured and careful. “You can go in a million times and it doesn’t work, some people go in once and walk out. Some do it who don’t need it.”
We discuss how ingrained drinking is in British culture. “It’s a story we tell ourselves, whether you go out after work or after you’ve done the school run, we’re like, ‘Oh I need a bit of Dutch courage’ or ‘I need to loosen up a bit’. You get used to it and then you realise you’re not comfortable in yourself.”
While her sobriety has been the main focus for the past couple of years, for a long time it was her sexuality. In 2022 she made the BBC television series Planet Sex with Cara Delevingne so that she could open up the conversation about sexuality, as much for herself as others. How does she feel about it now? “The internalised phobia takes a long time to understand because it’s built into you,” she says.
Her parents, she tells me, never sat her down and told her it was OK to love whomever she wanted to love, more that it was ingrained that you were assumed straight if you were a woman. “It’s a generational thing. I don’t think it was their fault at all. It’s just how it was. I think a lot of parents thought, ‘Oh, if I have a gay child I have done something wrong.’ ” Does she have any advice for teenage girls questioning their sexuality? “Don’t think the problem is you,” she says. She also dismisses the notion that just because you’ve slept with a member of the same sex you are automatically gay. “The point is to experiment, but it doesn’t have to change your identity, if that makes sense.”
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In the early hours of March 15, four days after she started in Cabaret, she received a phone call to say that her LA house was on fire. It ended up burning to the ground. “It sucks but everyone was safe and, like anything, if I’d not been sober I would still be reeling over that. It would still affect me really deeply. Of course it affected me, it’s super sad. It never won’t be. But I don’t use it as a tool to keep myself sad.”
Is she now thinking of moving back to the UK? “Probably not, I love being in America,” she says. “But I also love travelling around. I love, love, love change.” One area that seems to have given her stability is her relationship with her British girlfriend, Leah, a singer who performs under the name Minke. They both went to the boarding school Bedales and knew each other but only recently reconnected. Having mostly dated American women, does it make a difference she’s a Brit? “Yes, I don’t know why but it does. There’s a familiarity to it, she understands.”
They love going to concerts and she reels off a list of the shows they’re seeing in the next few weeks: Girls Aloud, Taylor Swift, Troye Sivan, Robbie Williams and Stevie Nicks. “Leah likes old rock, Fleetwood Mac, whereas I like R&B and old-school hip-hop, like the Notorious BIG,” she says. “And I love the wave of lesbians in music now, like Chappell Roan and Reneé Rapp.
“We teach each other so many things. Two years ago we were backstage at Glastonbury and we took a photo with this guy. I said to Leah afterwards, who was that? She was like, ‘What? That was Bruce Springsteen!’ I had no idea what he looked like. She thinks that’s blasphemy.” Most of all Delevingne is waiting for the Spice Girls to reunite: “I pestered Victoria Beckham about it once at Glastonbury. She was like, ‘Please stop talking to me about that.’ ”
What about the future, will she and Leah get married, have children? “I think I’m the type of gay who feels a bit annoyed about marriage — why do we have to fit into this very old idea of signing a contract? I prefer the idea of a spiritual union. The priority for me is the relationship. But if marriage comes along with that, that’s fine. I would love a family for sure.”
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She gets up. “I’m going to play tennis,” she says. “My father has sweetly arranged for us to use a court nearby.” She kisses me goodbye and waddles off to her bedroom singing Leah’s name again, her dog, Alfie, trotting behind her.
Della Vite Zero is available at Selfridges and dellavite.com
Styling: Judit Melis
Hair: Alfie Sackett at LGA Management
Make-up: Valeria Ferreira at The Wall Group using Cover FX
Nails: Michelle Class at LMC Worldwide using Chanel La Crème Main and Le Vernis in Ballerina
Set design: Tobias Blackmore at Saint Luke Artists
Local production: The Curated
