Cara Delevingne may just be 30 years old, but she’s already walked enough catwalks and attended enough red carpets to deliver a lifetime of stellar looks. The actor-model-designer (she has a collection coming out with the Karl Lagerfeld brand) reflected on her best ensembles for Vogue’s Life in Looks series.
It all began in 2002, when Delevingne attended Jocelyn Stevens’ birthday party with her family. The young Delevingne wore a dapper suit with a wide-brimmed black hat and a floppy bow tie (her sisters, Poppy and Chloe, also wore suits and hats). “I loved to dress up and become someone else,” Delevingne says of her style at the time.
Delevingne became a runway regular in the early 2010s. Looking at a photo of her walking for Burberry in the fall shows of 2011, Delevingne remembers how nervous she would get about walking in high heels. “Always when I was walking down, the first couple times, all that was going through my head was ‘please don’t fall, please don’t fall,’” she says. In fact, her trick for getting the hang of walking in high heels was to purposefully try to trip a little. “Fall over in the rehearsal so I wouldn’t fall over in the show,” she explains.
Delevingne had a long, loving relationship with Karl Lagerfeld, which began when she walked her first Chanel show in 2012. “I was very much just terrified, I remember seeing Karl for the first time and just standing there awkwardly not trying to look at him and he came up to me and said ‘don’t worry, you’re meant to be here,’” she says. Her last time walking for the house was in fall 2019, though she’s working with Lagerfeld’s namesake label on a collection of genderless and eco-friendly clothing. “Being able to go back and do a collection with Karl Lagerfeld, [I’m] really thinking about what he taught me,” she says, later adding, “I want it to be the people’s collection, not ours.”
Delevingne also reflected on her times on the cover of American Vogue. Her first appearance was in September 2014. She stood in between models Karlie Kloss and Joan Smalls for the shoot. “Those two were model icons to me and I was like ‘what am I doing in the middle of this,’” she says. Delevingne made another appearance on the cover a year later, while promoting her leading role in Paper Towns. “To be on the cover of US Vogue as an actress was so cool, a dream come true,” she adds.
