Interview: Poppy Delevingne on weddings, sister Cara and Sienna Miller

It’s been a whirlwind year for Poppy D. She talks about her ‘incredible weddings’, Karl’s cat and why she’s on a rollercoaster ride with Cara
Charlotte Edwardes16 September 2014

Poppy Delevingne — model, muse and sister of Cara D — has a wonderfully bone-crunching handshake for someone so slight, and a husky, breathy, conspiratorial way of speaking that makes everything she says sound like a filthy secret. She sits so close to me on a bench in the middle of an exhibition of photographs of Coco Chanel’s apartment by Sam Taylor-Johnson that I can smell her breath, and she’s stroking my arm with her fingertips as she speaks.

The vibe is more 2am at Chiltern Firehouse than 5.45pm at an opening in the Saatchi Gallery — but the proximity, the intimacy, the whole kissy-strokey-finger-clicky confidence appears to be a necessary part of the initiation into Planet Delevingne.

And the things she says! My goodness, her life is astonishingly charmed. As anyone who reads Grazia knows, she has recently married James Cook, 35, a director at his father’s aviation firm ATC Lasham.

They had not one but two “incredible weddings”. The first was for family (“I have a huge family”) at St Paul’s Church, Knightsbridge, for which she wore a beaded Chanel gown. The second, a week later, was “much more low key”: 250 friends — including Georgia May Jagger, Joan Collins, and Sienna Miller — in the Marrakech countryside.

Frow friends: Rosario Dawson, Camille Rowe and Poppy Delevingne attend the Spring/Summer 2015 collection by Desigual during Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York (Pic: EPA/JASON SZENES)

There she wore Pucci chiffon, “yellow, pink, lilac, green, blue. We needed to mix it up a bit — I wasn’t going to do two white dresses! It was very rustic laid-back, romantic — fields of roses, ducklings running around, willow trees and bull frogs — one of which I almost squashed during the service.”

By mistake?

“No.” Her eyes widen behind layers of smoky kohl. “Because it was being so loud.”

Poppy is wearing spiked heels, hair vacuumed into a knot at the back of her head. She is blessed with the same delicate bone structure as her sisters, the same blondeness (“actually, I’m the blondest”), and is head to toe in a see-through catsuit printed with the chequered pattern of an Arab keffiyeh — the scarf Yasser Arafat made synonymous with the Palestinian struggle. It’s accessorised with a Perspex handbag in the shape of a petrol can and I fear there’s a subliminal message here that I haven’t quite grasped.

“Isn’t it cool?” she says. “So witty.” She’s “entranced” by Taylor-Johnson’s photographs, she says. “There’s a ghostly presence, don’t you think?. It’s like Coco’s soul is in the pictures, which makes them come alive.”

Happily married: Poppy Delevingne and her husband James Cook at the Chiltern Firehouse (Pic: WeirPhotos / Splash News)

Chanel girls trot like ponies around us in big heels with blonde blow-dries and black sheaths. It’s very Scott Fitzgerald. I’m here to interview her about her work as a Chanel “fidele”, which is a sort of live mannequin, someone who models the clothes and breathes the brand.

“It’s the dreamiest job a girl could ever wish for,” she purrs. “Every season, every collection, every show I’ve become more attached to the brand. It’s a family-like relationship. I try out all the latest beauty products and participate in all the shows. It’s pretty magical.”

It’s easy to see why they picked Poppy. There is an ethereal quality about her, and something of the decadence of the Thirties. She’s vaguely posh, too — her grandfather is Sir Jocelyn Stevens, former chairman of English Heritage; her grandmother, Janie Sheffield, was lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret.

Sisters: Poppy with Cara Delevingne, seen leaving her London home wearing a Fox mask and holding her pet Rabbit "Cecil Delevingne" in its cage (Pic: Splash)

Evelyn Waugh would’ve loved her. She can throw her head back and laugh gaily, and then suddenly pull up straight, eyes round and ready for a prize coincidence. (“Oh. My. God,” she says when I ask if she’s read Caitlin Moran. “That is so f***ing bizarre. I was replaying it in my head, thinking, ‘how does she know?’”)

She loves Coco Chanel as “one of the first designers to really allow women to become tomboys. She was a pioneer. I really admire her for that. And all those cigarettes…”

Does she smoke?

“No, absolutely not. Never.”

“And Karl Lagerfeld is just a genius. And hilarious.”

Starry set: Cara, Poppy and Suki Waterhouse out and about in London (Pix: Rex)

Funniest of all, she says, is his “love for his cat Choupette”, a white fluffy red-point Birman with its own Twitter account and Wikipedia entry, as well as a make-up campaign with Shu Uemera.

“He takes rolls and rolls of film of Choupette,” she says, “and takes you to his studio and shows you picture after picture of her and says how she eats better than anyone else in the household. It’s so funny. Choupette literally has the finest tuna, the finest of everything a cat could ever have.”

Or even a person? “Ha! Yes.”

The relationship between man and cat (they sit together at mealtimes) is “mad, bonkers”, Poppy says, “but when he’s talking about it, he makes it sound so normal. It’s brilliant. She has her own cushion. Probably a whole room full.”

THE Delevingne sisters (there are three of them — Chloe, 31, Poppy, 28, Cara, 22) are “very close. Thick as thieves. There is not a day that goes past when we don’t talk to each other.”

Poppy at The Glamour of Italian Fashion 1945-2014 VIP dinner at the V&A (Pic: David Fisher/REX)
David Fisher/REX

Although there are six years between her and Cara, she says: “I was quite juvenile and I loved playing with her, more so than climbing trees with Chloe. We were all quite tomboyish, quite outdoorsy, feral.”

Their father Charles is a property developer, mother Pandora a personal shopper. They grew up in a house in Wandsworth “with a massive garden, sandboxes, monkey bars, a trampoline. We were always playing tennis and scratching our knees and hiding.”

They were naughty (“I was the worst”) but were sent to the liberal boarding school Bedales, where “to get expelled you’d have to be pretty bad-ass”.

Did she ever want to go to university? “Oh my God, the UCAS form did my head in,” she says. “That personal statement — pfff, no thanks. It gave me massive anxiety.

“But I was hell-bent on doing well,” she adds. So she rented an apartment in New York with the actress Sienna Miller and “toyed with the idea of acting. Met some agents. It kept me on my toes.”

New York was “quite a dangerous place for me. It’s wild and mad and I loved it. But after a while I just wanted to go to bed.”

“London,” she says, “is better, grounded-wise. I get way more sleep.”

She’d still like to pursue acting “if the right thing came along”. Alternatively, she’d like to be a writer. (She’s says of Caitlin Moran: “I feel like I’m really like her.”)

I suggest that writing is exhausting — like having homework. “Don’t say that,” she says, touching my arm with a deathly seriousness. “You’re scaring the shit out of me.”

She met husband James “in Ibiza. Scorpio Island everyone calls it — they say if you fall in love in Ibiza then it lasts for ever”.

Is she superstitious? “Just stupid things like that, and black cats crossing in front of you. Actually cats in general. They kind of creep me out.”

I draw a sudden breath.

“Oh my God, I don’t mean Choupette,” she gasps. “Choupette is not a cat. She’s human.”

It’s a mark of her milieu that Cook dated two of her friends — Emily Compton (who attended her London wedding nine months pregnant) and Martha Ward — before settling on Poppy.

Isn’t she too young to be married? “I was one of the last of my best girlfriends,” she says. “There’s maybe one or two left scratching around for a husband.” She quickly corrects this: “Actually, they’re probably having the time of their lives.”

Poppy pronounces baby, “bay-bay”, and “will definitely have one. One hundred per cent, yes.” But not now.

Meanwhile the couple are renovating a house in Ravenscourt Park, “so that’s going to be our beehive” and own another in the country.

Of Cara, she says: “We’re so different yet so similar. We’re on the same sort of rollercoaster, we get to share this mad world together, although hers is obviously on a different level and I am there to catch her.”

Second Floor, a photographic exhibition by Sam Taylor-Johnson of the private apartment of Mademoiselle Chanel, is currently open at the Saatchi Gallery from 10am-6pm daily and runs until October 4

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