Question - What do you think of Cara Delevingne's decision to quit modelling?

I definitely applaud her for realising that she wasn't happy, and taking steps to change that. So many of us stay stuck in things that make us miserable because we're scared of change.

I quite enjoyed modelling itself. I was at the plus-size end of the spectrum (though not in the way that Tess Holliday or Crystal Renn were - I wore a UK 14) so I didn't get quite the same amount of crud from people about staying skinny, which I think helped me to enjoy myself for longer. Plus, I liked the pretty clothes, and it paid my way through college, and it was a job where I could work and concentrate on working out chemistry equations in my head at the same time, which is why I got into it in the first place. *laughs*

But I didn't like the industry. I didn't like working for a machine that perpetuated what I felt was one of the biggest legal cons of all time. I started out working in art modelling, and when I moved into doing photography for one particular photographer, I insisted on one particular clause in my contract: no photoshop, no airbrushing. Naive, looking back, but at the time it seemed reasonable. This was late 90s / early 00s, and people weren't quite so obsessed with obtaining the unobtainable. The first photographer was fine with that. The second and third were fine with that. And then somewhere along the line, people weren't fine with it. They'd be fine when we signed a contract, and then they'd try to bully me into it, or "fix" pictures behind my back. And I found myself thinking - I've been in hair and makeup for four hours, I've dieted and exercised my way to a fairly decent (if curvy) body, my skin is radiant, my hair is glossy, and I have an excellent photographer. Why isn't this enough? If you want someone with a longer neck and thicker lips and less muscular calves and a smaller nose, why didn't you hire that girl instead of me?

A while after my personal dissatisfaction started, I started realising how much fakery there is in the fashion and beauty industries. It sounds so obvious now, but at the time I convinced myself that it was okay to lie to people, because we were presenting a fantasy. Turns out, it's a fine line between fantasy and fraud. Faking it digitally has become such a thing that we now have anti-wrinkle creams advertised by women who have all their wrinkles airbrushed out. We have whitening toothpaste where the white is digitally added to the adverts. And I'm just not okay with that. Nor am I okay with working to advertise clothes that are only wearable by a tiny percentage of the population. If any other industry produced a product that was marketed to everyone but was only usable by 1%, or 2%, or even 5%, you'd call that a flawed product. Yet the fashion industry has managed to create things that the majority of us a) can't afford and b) can't get into - and somehow convinced us all that it's US who are faulty rather than the products, and that we need to starve ourselves and spend insane amounts of money to prove that we're worthy of being part of it. That's what I mean when I call it the biggest con I've ever known. Machiavelli would have been proud.

Don't get me wrong, I still love clothes. I love pretty things in general. I don't mind spending a fair bit for beautiful things that are made to last. And things ARE getting better, in some respects. But I couldn't ever be part of the fashion industry again, not even behind the camera. It sucked the life out of me by the time I was 21.

People get so caught up in the "fashion" part that they forget the "industry" part. It's a money-making machine, at the heart of it. And that isn't going to change. It doesn't matter how many Sati Marie Frosts burn out and leave - or even how many Cara Delevingnes do. Because models are disposable, even the successful, famous ones. They get tired, they get pregnant, they get fat, and most of all they get OLD, and when that happens, the industry is all too happy to trade you in for the newer model. (Pun acknowledged.)

This post originally appeared as a comment on www.manrepeller.com .