Curse of the catwalk as Cara Delevingne joins long line of supermodels who struggled with fame, addiction and abuse
LONG hours, abusive photographers and the pressure to be beautiful, is there a more toxic career than becoming a catwalk model?
Cara Delevingne has sparked fears for her wellbeing after a series of worrying pictures emerged of the model.
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The latest snaps showed the model turned actress looking confused as she was turned away from Jay-Z’s private jet.
Earlier snaps had shown her smoking from a pipe before going into a sex shop.
The 30-year-old started modelling at the age of 10 and went on to model for Chanel Fendi and Burberry before turning her hand to acting.
She said she quit modelling in 2016 due to industry pressures.
Writing for Time MOTTO, she said: “Yes, your career is very important – but it’s not the most important.
“Of course I was proud of my accomplishments, but I wasn’t genuinely happy.”
But the latest troubling pictures appear to show the strain of earning her £100million fortune by 30.
Her appearance has raised questions about how young models are left to their own devices in the whirlwind modelling industry.
Professor Carolyn Mair, author of the Psychology of Fashion, said: “The model industry is peopled by young and potentially vulnerable workers who are typically self-employed and do not have adequate support.
“For many, their careers are short, and they endure working conditions such as pressure to perform 24/7 and always look their best, that are damaging to their mental health.”
And Cara is by no means the first model to fall victim to the catwalk curse.
Troubling industry legacy
Kate Moss was nicknamed ‘Cocaine Kate’ after she was pictured snorting the class A drug in 2005.
Kate – who at the time was dating Libertines frontman Pete Doherty – lost work with Burberry as a result.
In 2015, she was escorted by police off an easyJet flight at Luton airport after calling the pilot “a basic b***h”.
Passengers told how she was swigging vodka from the bottle and getting up out of her seat when the seatbelt sign was on.
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Now sober, Kate even manages to poke fun at her wild days, joking at a campaign event for Diet Coke: “Well, I have always loved coke.”
Meanwhile Kate’s half-sister Lottie also struggled with the chaotic lifestyle of modelling before going to rehab this year.
Lottie – who now models on OnlyFans – told the Call Her Daddy podcast: “I just thought it was normal and I was going to these events and parties and I was exhausted, that was the only way I was getting through it.
“A lot of the time I would be showing up to set and I would not be happy and I didn’t want to do it, I’d be crying my eyes out and they said, ‘we’ll just get you some drugs, you can have a drink and then you’ll be fine’.”
Kate’s catwalk buddy Naomi Campbell also had her fair share of drama.
The model – who started posing aged 15 – has had a chequered history of assaulting staff with phones.
She admitted throwing a jewel-encrusted blackberry at an assistant’s head in 2005 and another phone at a maid in 2007.
She was handed community service at the New York City Department of Sanitation and turned up every day in couture.
In 2009, she was given a suspended sentence for assaulting a photographer in Italy.
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The model has chilled out in recent years – and even became a mum aged 50 last year.
But the risk of modelling is not just confined to the Nineties and Noughties.
Model du jour Bella Hadid recently opened up about how she struggled with alcohol.
Aged just 17, the star was arrested for driving at twice the legal limit.
Last year she decided to quit drinking after a scan showed how drinking had impacted her brain.
She told InStyle: “My social anxiety was something that slowly crept up on me as I grew into my twenties.
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“It got harder for me to go out without having one drink to calm my nerves, which made me not want to go out at all so I was just hibernating between jobs.”
Yet the star admitted this year that she has started drinking champagne while avoiding hard liquor to achieve “moderation”.
Sin City actress Jaime King spoke out about her heroin addiction which eventually killed her photographer boyfriend Davide Sorrenti.
Jaime, who modelled for Dior and Chanel, admitted she struggled with addiction for five years in her teens after being offered the drug at a shoot.
The actress sought help but not until after her boyfriend died of kidney failure.
She told the New York Daily News in 2015: “I was surrounded by drug abuse. It was something that was always there.
“The editor, the photographer, everybody was smoking or shooting drugs, so it was natural for me.
“I just thought that was the way things worked. Did I shoot heroin? No, I sniffed it.”
