Cara Delevingne Opens Up About Depression (& Denies Quitting Modeling)

On Wednesday, It model Cara Delevingne made her return to modeling with a new campaign for Hedi Slimane's au revoir collection for Saint Laurent. Needless the say, the internet freaked out. Besides a Chanel eyeglasses campaign earlier this year, the bold-browed beauty has been keeping her fashion-industry involvement to a minimum of late. And though many reports announced last summer that Delevingne had retired from the field altogether at the age of 23 (to be fair, she did tell The Times: “I am not doing fashion work any more...modeling just made me feel a bit hollow after a while."), she explained on Twitter Thursday evening that those rumors were untrue. In a multi-Tweet "rant" (what she called it in the final message), Delevingne claimed that she didn't actually "quit" modeling, but instead felt it was necessary to cut back on her work due to a battle with depression:

In the past, Delevingne has been quite candid about her love-hate relationship with her modeling career: Last month, she penned an essay for Time's new female-focused website, Motto, in which she discussed feeling discontented with her career. "When you do everything you can to make people happy with your work but there are still people who aren’t happy, you start to think, Well, I’ve worked my a** off. I’ve done everything. I’ve pushed myself into the ground," she wrote. "You just feel like you’re constantly disappointing others, and there’s this moment when you’re like, Wait, what am I trying to do? Who am I doing this for?" It's these feelings of inadequacy that she resurfaced on Twitter, reminding her followers that even though she is struggling, as she told Rupert Everett last October at the Women in the World conference in London, "Mental illness and depression are nothing to be ashamed of...the cracks within us are the beautiful parts that need to have light shed on them."