Cara Delevingne Pens Powerful Essay On Why She Quit Modelling

Despite her tremendous success in the fashion world, Cara Delevingne was not that really into the modelling thing. The runway muse turned actress penned a piece for Motto, in which she talks about her struggles feeling content with her modeling career in light of all the scrutiny that came with the job.

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“I worked hard to be accepted by the fashion community in ways beyond my physical appearance. In no time, though, I found myself surrendering to the industry’s approval process,” she wrote. “I felt like I needed validation from everyone. As a result, I lost sight of myself and what it meant to be happy, what it meant to be successful.”

Delevingne says that getting whipped up into the industry also distorted her perspective on what she really wanted in life. She was feeling unfulfilled in her work and the pressures of the image-conscious fashion world, where she never felt good enough no matter how hard she worked.

“When you do everything you can to make people happy with your work, but there are still people who aren’t happy, you start to think, Well, I’ve worked my ass off. I’ve done everything. I’ve pushed myself into the ground. You just feel like you’re constantly disappointing others, and there’s this moment when you’re like, Wait, what am I trying to do? Who am I doing this for?”

Delevingne has been very vocal about leaving the modelling world to focus on what she really wanted to pursue — acting. And so far, following her passions has paid off. She starred in the 2015 summer flick Paper Towns, had a role in last year’s Pan movie, and is slated to appear in several films over the next year, including the forthcoming AbFab movie, Kids in Love, and Valérian and the City of a Thousand Planets.

We all know that modelling is a tough industry, and even when you’re as popular and successful as Delevingne is, it can take a serious toll. Another high-fashion model, Ajak Deng, recently announced on Instagram her plans to leave the modelling world, citing the “fakes and the lies” as the reason for her departure. A week later, she decided to take it all back and continue her career, realizing that as a black model, she needed to keep with it in order to help represent women of color in an industry that often overlooks people with her features.

“Yes, sure giving up is easier but who will fight the war that we are so in denial about? I am just getting started and modelling isn’t the only thing I will be successful in, in my lifetime,” she wrote in a post to Instagram. “I apologize to every kind souls/hearts that I have broken in the past week. I thought giving up was easier but I am going to stay and fight this war with kindness, forgiveness, love and support to all humanity. We are all beautiful and deserved to be respected.”

Clearly, for Delevingne, the only thing truly at stake when it came to her exit from the fashion industry was her own happiness. We doubt that she has any future plans to model as she used to, whereas Deng’s return seems to have more to do with being a face for an oft-ignored demographic.

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Still, both their stories are an example of how truly difficult it is for models to retain their sense of self and their happiness in this industry. It’s certainly something that makes you think about how we approach modelling and what is expected of these girls. Yes, being a model is tough, but we need to remember that they’re human. We might have happier models if we collectively treated them as such.