Karl Lagerfeld handed Cara Delevingne a Chanel-branded megaphone on 30 September 2014 and sent her down the runway in Paris to lead a mock protest. Ten days earlier, Emma Watson had stood at a podium at the United Nations and launched a gender equality campaign called He For She. Its name was on one of the placards the models carried behind Delevingne.
Others read HISTORY IS HER STORY and WOMEN’S RIGHTS ARE MORE THAN ALRIGHT. Delevingne was 22 and had just been cast as Margo in Paper Towns. Gisele Bรผndchen, Kendall Jenner, Georgia May Jagger and Lagerfeld himself joined in behind her. Watson was not there, and nothing on the record suggests she had any hand in it.
It is still the closest Cara Delevingne and Emma Watson have come to a collaboration, and a fashion house staged it.
Table of Contents
Every time the two have actually crossed paths
The public record is shorter than the photo galleries suggest.
In the same room
- May 2014. A Royal Marsden hospital fundraiser hosted by Prince William, also attended by Kate Moss.
- December 2014. The British Fashion Awards in London. Watson took the top style prize. Delevingne won Model of the Year for the second time.
- May 2017. Backstage at the MTV Movie & TV Awards in Los Angeles, where photographers caught the two together.
Linked without meeting
- September 2014. The Chanel show, where Delevingne carried the HeForShe slogan ten days after Watson’s UN address. Harry Styles and Tom Hiddleston also backed the campaign that autumn.
- 2019. Both appeared on the Sunday Times Young Rich List, along with Styles.
No photographer has caught them in the same place since 2017, and nothing on the public record shows either woman speaking about the other.
Both fronted Burberry, two years apart
One connection predates all of it. Watson fronted a Burberry campaign in 2009, shot by Mario Testino, while she was still finishing the Harry Potter films. Two years later Christopher Bailey put Delevingne on the Burberry runway at London Fashion Week, and she went on to front the label’s campaigns for most of the next six years. When Burberry announced her, the Mirror ran the story under the headline “Emma Watson move over”.
They were never in a campaign together.
Where Emma Watson is now
Watson, 36, has not released a feature film since Little Women in 2019, and she has been fairly direct about why she is in no hurry. She told a podcast last year that she prefers to date people who know little about her film career, and described people apologising for not having seen her work as “bliss to me”.
She has been at Oxford since 2023, working towards a master’s degree in creative writing, and rows as a coxswain for a college crew. The same year, she and her brother Alex launched a gin brand called Renais.
Public appearances come a few times a year. In June she sat beside Prince William and Benedict Cumberbatch at a United for Wildlife business forum in London, twelve years after the Royal Marsden dinner. Last October she went to a Miu Miu dinner during Paris Fashion Week. In March she appeared at a Dior dinner in Los Angeles before the Oscars, where photographers caught her with her old Harry Potter co-star Robert Pattinson. Tabloids have spent months linking her to a Mexican businessman named Gonzalo Hevia Baillรจres. Neither has confirmed it.
Where Cara Delevingne is now
Delevingne, 33, has had the louder year. She was on the cover of Playboy this month, talking about sobriety. In May she signed to Warner Records and put out her first two songs, “I Forgot” and “Out of My Head”, with a seven-minute video directed by Jessica Lee Gagnรฉ, the cinematographer behind Severance. An eleven-city tour followed in June, opening in Berlin.
The music came out of a rough stretch. She entered a twelve-step programme in late 2022, shortly after turning 30, and spoke about it at length in Vogue the following spring. She has been sober since. She told BBC Radio 1 that “Out of My Head” came from her first year sober and the “internal conflict and disassociation and all that fun stuff” that went with it.
She has kept acting throughout. Suicide Squad in 2016, a season of Only Murders in the Building in 2022, then Sally Bowles in Cabaret on the West End two years ago. In May she was at Cannes for a photocall for Club Kid, a film from I Love LA creator Jordan Firstman.
Earlier that month, on stage at a Rosalรญa show at the O2 in London, she told the crowd she is a lesbian. She had identified as pansexual since 2020. She has been with the musician Minke since 2022.
| Emma Watson | Cara Delevingne | |
|---|---|---|
| Age | 36 | 33 |
| Known for | Harry Potter, Little Women | Burberry campaigns, Suicide Squad |
| Last film | Little Women, 2019 | Club Kid, in production |
| Working on | Oxford master’s, Renais gin | Debut singles, touring, acting |
| Public appearances | A few a year | Near constant |
So are Cara Delevingne and Emma Watson friends?
Nothing suggests it. Neither has called the other a friend in public, and no joint interview exists. There is no sign of a falling-out either.
What links them is a short run of overlapping events in the middle of the last decade, plus one show where a designer put Watson’s campaign slogan in Delevingne’s hands and pointed her at a catwalk.
One of them has spent the years since making herself harder to find. The other spent this month on a magazine cover. The last photograph of the two in the same place is nine years old.
