Cara Delevingne’s many reinventions: The rebel model now making the leap to music

Before she became an actress and entrepreneur, Cara Delevingne, 33, was already commanding attention as a model. Her defiant attitude and her eyebrows — which broke with the industry’s classic beauty standards — turned her into a global phenomenon almost overnight. Her closeness to fans, her bold use of social media — back when influencers didn’t wield the power they do now — and her constant presence on platforms like Tumblr and Twitter propelled her to stardom.

It was 2012, when Delevingne went from being a young woman strolling through London’s exclusive Belgravia neighborhood to becoming one of the highest‑paid top models and a fixture on the world’s major runways. She never wanted to be labeled or pigeonholed; she wanted to be everything at once. Nearly 15 years later, she has proved it again: she has officially launched her career as a singer.

“Excited to announce my first ever headline shows! Been locked in at rehearsals, I can’t wait to play these shows,” she posted Tuesday on Instagram, where she has 39.6 million followers.

There is no trace of her past life on Instagram: only seven posts remain, all of them pointing to what’s coming next. “Music. It’s forever been my biggest fear and my greatest love,” she shares in another post. “I cannot quite believe we are finally here.”

Ahead of her lie 11 shows in six cities — including two in Barcelona, on June 3 and 5 as part of Primavera Sound — with which she hopes to prove that music is neither a whim nor just another entry in her long list of projects. Ever since she became a supermodel and a muse to designer Karl Lagerfeld, Delevingne has been closely tied to music: she has released songs, shared covers and spoken publicly about what it means to her. But this is the real leap.

“I’m a hopeless romantic. I’ve done some outwardly romantic gestures. I’ve written songs for people, serenaded people with poems,” she said back in a 2015 interview with BBC Radio 1.

She wasn’t dreaming of becoming a “pop star” overnight: “Singing, writing songs, is kind of my biggest fear, but it’s the thing I feel I need to conquer,” she told Vogue in 2015. Delevingne compared her musical ambition to “a flower growing through concrete,” explaining that has always been present in her life.

If Delevingne is known for anything, it’s for constant reinvention — for moving without fear of failure and following her instincts, her dreams and even her fears. Labels never suited her; she has always tried to outrun them, and in many ways she still does.

She was at the height of her modeling career when, in 2015, she decided to stop, step away from the runways and the multimillion‑dollar contracts with the world’s biggest brands. Delevingne was just 23 and had a dazzling future ahead of her.

“Modeling just made me feel a bit hollow after a while. It didn’t make me grow at all as a human being,” she told The London Times at the time. Delevingne eventually returned to the catwalks, though choosing her projects carefully and carving out space for self‑care.

Outside fashion, the path she has explored most deeply over the past fifteen years is acting. She starred in Paper Towns (2015), appeared in Suicide Squad (2016), and has five more projects — four of them without release dates — still to come.

“For me, it’s always about the character and the vision. What is the project’s meaning, its message, and dialogues? Before I accept a role, I want to know what questions the film or series raises and what the audience will take away from it,” she told Numéro in 2025.

She also tried her hand at writing. In 2017, she published Mirror, Mirror, a novel about four 16‑year‑old friends that allowed her to explore adolescence and themes such as friendship, sexuality, identity, triumph, and disappointment.

“The process of putting this novel together has been life-changing and something I hold really close to my heart,” she said in a statement released by the publisher.

Model, actress, writer — and entrepreneur. In 2020, together with her sisters, she founded Della Vite Prosecco, a wine company based in a northern Italian town in partnership with a third‑generation family of winemakers.

“Since 2020, we’ve been on a mission to flip the prosecco category on its head with a liquid so good it rivals champagne – bringing fresh energy into a category that’s long been ruled by tradition,” the company said in 2024.

The project hasn’t been free of controversy: in October 2025, the French champagne industry association sent a cease‑and‑desist letter accusing the brand of “unfair exploitation of its reputation” in its marketing.

So what is the art form that best defines Delevingne? “As an artist and a creative. I think we humans like to label people or put them in a box. But I’ve always been creative. The only thing I really can’t do is paint or draw, but I find and use whatever I can to express myself creatively,” she told Numéro. “I think I’ve always been rebellious. I’ve always liked doing things differently, and I’ve never been one to follow the rules. By that I mean the rules and conventions of society.”

But if there is one thing she has consistently taken pride in, it is her LGBTQ+ work and social activism. She was among the actresses who publicly denounced Harvey Weinstein. In 2017, she recounted how he tried to kiss her after a work meeting.

“One of the first things Harvey Weinstein ever said to me was, ‘You will never make it in this industry as a gay woman — get a beard,’” she recounted to Net‑a‑Porter in 2019. “When I’d just started to audition for films, he was naming people [women] I’m friends with — famous people — and asking, ‘Have you slept with this person?’ I just thought: this is insane.”

She has never hidden her sexuality, becoming a role model for many: “It took me a long time to accept the idea, until I first fell in love with a girl at 20 and recognized that I had to accept it,” she said in the same interview with Vogue. “Women are what completely inspire me.”

She remains a regular on red carpets, at premieres and at fashion shows, but in recent years she has fought to stay in the background — avoiding headlines about her relationships (her most high‑profile one was with Pretty Little Liars star Ashley Benson, between 2018 and 2020) or about her struggles with alcohol, which led her to enter a rehabilitation center in 2022. She is a free spirit, firmly in charge of her own decisions, and intends to keep it that way.

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