Cara

She’s one of the world’s most bankable supermodels with a burgeoning Hollywood career, but it’s her next step that she hopes will get people really talking. Kerry Potter heads to Paris for an audience with the unstoppable Ms Delevingne.

- Kerry Potter

A conversation with Cara Delevingne is a bit like going down a rabbit hole. You start off politely talking about make-up – the 26-year-old is the new face of Dior Addict Stellar Shine lipstick – and within moments you’ve zigzagged into feminism, masturbation, depression and her love of Bear Grylls.

Curiouser and curiouser.

For a globally famous supermodel – after Kendall Jenner, she was one of the highest paid in the world last year, raking in about £8m – she’s pleasingly un-supermodel. We’re sat on a sofa in the sumptuous penthouse suite of a Parisian hotel, surrounded by piles of colorful macarons, vases of plump pink peonies and chic silver bullets of Dior lipsticks. The setting is très French, but Delevingne is exceedingly English. ‘Do you mind if I take my shoes off?’ she asks in plummy tones. By all means, I say, relax. ‘Take it easssssssy!’ she trills, bursting into song, slipping off her pointy black flats and curling her long legs beneath her. She’s eccentric, effusive and when she can’t think of a sufficiently entertaining answer to a question, she swears like Hugh Grant in Four Weddings And A Funeral.

Delevingne may come from a privileged background – her maternal grandmother was once Princess Margaret’s lady-in-waiting and her godmother is Joan Collins – but she has an everywoman appeal that’s earned her 41.6m followers on Instagram and another 10m on Twitter. It’s this frankness and willingness to talk about her mental health, fluid sexuality and tricky teenage years (her mother, Pandora, battled heroin addiction and Delevingne was bullied at school) that have won her a legion of loyal fans.