More than just a pretty face

The job description for a supermodel used to be pretty straightforward: you dated Bryan Ferry or Mick Jagger; you appeared in a George Michael video; you bagged a Calvin Klein campaign. Falling off a Vivienne Westwood shoe during a runway show guaranteed you immortality. But now Cara Delevingne has declared that being a model, a career that has so far netted her an estimated £1 million, is akin to being ‘a kind of puppet’ and lacking in aspiration. ‘I get a lot of girls who say, “I just want to be a model so badly,” ’ the 21-year-old observed of her 1.68 million Twitter devotees. ‘And I think: “You can do better than that.” ’

Simon Chambers, director of Cara’s agency Storm, isn’t worried about his star recruit’s other interests. He says: ‘We manage models who are powerful advocates for leading charities, or are designers, chefs, photographers, business women, tech entrepreneurs. Life would be very dull if all we booked was fashion in magazines.’

If Cara is the leader of this new generation, Suki Waterhouse, Jourdan Dunn, Miranda Kerr, Edie Campbell and Karlie Kloss are right behind her. Kloss waxes lyrical about her gluten-free biscuit line Karlie’s Kookies more than she ever does about the joys of Dior, while Miranda Kerr would rather bill herself as a moisturiser expert than the model who pulled in £4.2 million last year: ‘I don’t define myself as a model,’ she told Net-a-porter recently. ‘I treat myself more as an athlete… If someone asks me what I do, I say, “I have my own skincare line.” ’

Jourdan Dunn sees herself as a chef — she fronts Well Dunn, a cookery show on Jay-Z’s YouTube channel. Waterhouse, meanwhile, promotes herself as an artist and musician (and girlfriend of Bradley Cooper); Campbell likes to bill herself as an equestrian, alongside her horse-mad boyfriend Otis Ferry. Ireland-based Daria Werbowy claims the only reason she models is so she can travel and take photos, like 1990s supermodel Helena Christensen, now a respected fashion photographer.

Amanda Bretherton, president of Next Models, which represents Waterhouse, says: ‘Brands are engaging more and more with the person and not just the image. The public engage with them not just for how they look but because of what they talk about, what they share and how they communicate.’

But these girls make a ton of money showing off expensive outfits, so when Cara shrugged that fashion ‘really is just clothes!’ to The Guardian, it was both hypocritical and delightfully Emperor’s-new-rags rebellious.

Pandora Lennard is the director of the Anti-Agency, a model agency that specialises in models for whom modelling is only a part-time job. ‘We would never get in the way of our models’ other careers or education,’ she says. ‘That is their priority; modelling is secondary.’ She cites one of her most-booked girls, Georgie: ‘An incredible knitwear designer doing her final collection.’ She’s not the only one: ‘There’s also Amy [Blakemore], who took time to write a book of poetry. It won the Melita Hume Poetry Prize. We don’t ostracise models for doing other work, we celebrate it.’

Maybe model denying is part of the backlash against the mad pace of technology. Cara et al certainly seem to believe that the grass will be more meaningful on the other side of the runway. But there’s more to it than that and Lily Cole sums it up. She first made headlines as the 14-year-old doll-faced redhead working the catwalks for Gaultier, Galliano and Chanel. But then she got a First from Cambridge and last year I found myself following the then 25-year-old around the Amazonian rainforest while she talked about exchange paradigms and global capitalism as she started a project to make jewellery out of wild rubber harvested from the forest to help local families.

Models are supposed to put clothes on, look good in them and encourage you to buy them, not advise you against smart designer goods. But the credit crunch has shaken our confidence in bottomless capitalism, making being a model embarrassing or untenable.

Fashion photographer Amelia Troubridge believes that being a spanner in the works is a good commercial move. ‘The luxury industry today has a huge amount of power and it’s looking for substance,’ she says, referring to Cara whom she photographed last year during the making of Michael Winterbottom’s The Face of an Angel, in which Cara stars. ‘Cara wants to be an actress. She’s a beautiful, honest, tomboy oddball and that’s why she’s landed major campaigns.’