Cara Delevingne was four months sober when she spoke with Vogue in January 2023 for its April cover story. The model credited her turnaround partially to the paparazzi photos taken of her shortly after her 30th birthday in September when she was “looking disheveled and distressed at the Van Nuys Airport” after returning to Los Angeles following Burning Man. “I hadn’t slept. I was not okay,” she told Vogue. “It’s heartbreaking because I thought I was having fun, but at some point it was like, Okay, I don’t look well. … You know, sometimes you need a reality check, so in a way, those pictures were something to be grateful for.”
The model revealed she’d had “interventions of a sort, but I wasn’t ready” to sober up. “That’s the problem. If you’re not face-first on the floor and ready to get up again, you won’t,” she says. The photos at the airport were the impetus, and she quietly checked herself into rehab late in 2022. “I hadn’t seen a therapist in three years,” she says. “I just kind of pushed everyone away, which made me realize how much I was in a bad place. I always thought that the work needs to be done when the times are bad, but actually, the work needs to be done when they’re good.”
“The work needs to be done consistently. It’s never going to be fixed or fully healed, but I’m okay with that, and that’s the difference,” she adds. During the interview, Cara spoke about how her substance issues began when she was young. “I was happy as a kid for sure, but I think when I grew up, I looked back and realized, That’s not normal,” says Cara, citing her upbringing as the daughter of a property developer father and socialite mother and how there was always some “emotional chaos” in her life. “And then, as a teenager, it just all came plummeting down. That’s also when I started drinking and partying.”
The COVID-19 pandemic exasperated issues, specifically the isolation Cara felt after she and her then-girlfriend Ashley Benson broke up in April 2020. Cara had a “complete existential crisis” since her identity at that point was “so wrapped up in work. And when that was gone, I felt like I had no purpose.” Cara fell back into old habits. With the death of her grandmother in 2022, things got to a breaking point. At the 2022 Met Gala, “I went and got blackout afterward,” she said. “It was like, What am I doing? The day after, I had to travel to my granny’s funeral. It was horrible.”
Cara shared that she obtained her sobriety after committing to a 12-step program; in the past, she was always looking for “the quick fix of healing,” which never stuck. “This time, I realized that 12-step treatment was the best thing, and it was about not being ashamed of that,” she told Vogue. “The community made a huge difference. The opposite of addiction is connection, and I really found that in 12-step.”
Cara said that in addition to the 12-step meetings, she has weekly therapy sessions, a stable diet (Three meals a day), and a twice-daily yoga and meditation practice. “This process obviously has its ups and downs, but I’ve started realizing so much,” Cara said. “People want my story to be this after-school special where I just say, ‘Oh look, I was an addict, and now I’m sober, and that’s it.’ And it’s not as simple as that. It doesn’t happen overnight.”
Vogue’s April 2023 issue is available on newsstands nationwide on March 21st.