Cara Delevingne is smitten with her girlfriend, Minke.
The supermodel and musician met in boarding school and reconnected 12 years later. Minke, born Leah Mason, began her career as a blues singer-songwriter with a record label in Nashville. As time went on, she told LadyGunn in 2019 that she began experimenting with a new persona and “secretly” came up with her stage name, Minke.
“I started forming this project in my head while I was doing the blues stuff,” she said. “I wanted to take those blues roots – because that’s in my DNA – and be true to my experiences. That’s why Minke has got some blues guitar riffs in there, with modern production and pop stuff in between.”
The couple were first spotted together on vacation in Portofino, Italy, in June 2022 by the Daily Mail, the same month they made things official. Minke celebrated her two-year anniversary with Cara in June 2024, penning a sweet post on Instagram about how her partner “inspires her to be a better version” of herself.
“Everyday is better with your light. My rock, my safe space, my home,” Minke wrote. “2 years baby. Feels like yesterday and forever ago. I can’t remember what life was like without your life and I never want to know.”
From her career as a musician to her support of Cara throughout the years, here’s everything to know about Cara Delevingne’s girlfriend, Minke.
Minke is originally from London, but now spends majority of her time in Los Angeles. Even though she’s moved over the pond, her British roots are still present in her music, including the title of her 2019 debut album, The Tearoom.
Cara isn’t the only star in her relationship as Minke is an established singer-songwriter. Her father was a drummer, and she began playing music at a very young age. Minke told Beyond the Stage Magazine in March 2019 that she started taking piano and guitar lessons after her mother grew annoyed with her trying to play the drums like her father.
“The way I was trained really helped me learn melody and musicality,” said Minke. “I already had this rhythmic and melodic training. Then I became completely obsessed with music.”
Minke’s guitar teacher saw potential in the budding young artist and encouraged her to write music by studying Bob Dylan lyrics as an aid to “try to write my own song.” Minke tapped her emotional side to start writing music, and she began playing shows by 16.
“I had all these feelings I could sing about,” she said. “When I realized that, it was game over and I couldn’t concentrate on anything else.”
At 18, Minke was signed to a record label in Nashville where she performed under her birth name, Leah Mason. She started her career by singings blues, and told LadyGunn in a 2019 interview she grew tired of singing about “bein’ in a bar in Nashville.”
“I started to feel more and more like I was pretending,” said Minke.
After meeting her new manager at South by Southwest, she went through a “long process” shifting her sound out of the blues space, incorporating elements of pop in her work and performing under the name of Minke.
Growing up under the influence of her father who adored rock music, Minke told Beyond the Stage Magazine she adored the likes of Tom Petty, The Who, Stevie Ray Vaughan and -
Jimi Hendrix. On the flip side, she’s also admittedly inspired by emotional artists like Lana Del Rey, who encompass a “level of vulnerability” in their work.
“I really just love all these women who are just kicking ass and making their art really individual to themselves and opening the door for other people like me,” she said. “There’s a huge sense of that with artists like Lana Del Rey, Maggie Rogers, Robyn, there’s loads of them.”
“We’re all humans that are just trying to shuffle around on the planet and we’re all just trying to feel better all of the time,” Minke added. “Sad music makes you feel better, it makes you feel less alone.”
Cara and Minke started dating in June 2022, but they’d known each other for quite some time before making things official. The model revealed she met the musician at a boarding school in Hampshire, England, when they were young in an April 2023 interview with Vogue.
After years of no contact, they ran into each other at an Alanis Morissette concert, and they became official on June 5, 2022. Cara celebrated their two-year anniversary in an Instagram post on June 5, 2024.
Under a series of pictures of the couple “kissing in front of things,” Cara penned a sweet caption for the couple’s two-year anniversary. Cara commemorated their “two magical years” together, and said she didn’t expect to find love with “someone I went to school with (and had a baby gay crush on).”
“These past two years have been A LOT of life,” she wrote. “A lot of change, growth, pain and most importantly LOVE and I am so lucky to have found the perfect person to ride life’s ups and downs with. I cannot imagine living life without you.”
Minke has been a champion of Cara’s path to sobriety. In her April 2023 Vogue profile, the Paper Towns star opened up about her bipolar disorder and history of addiction. She revealed she began drinking alcohol at 7 and struggled with mental health issues throughout her adolescence while her mother, Pandora Delevingne, was simultaneously dealing with a heroin addiction.
“I was happy as a kid for sure, but I think when I grew up, I looked back and realized, ‘That’s not normal,’ ” Cara said of being born into a wealthy family. “And then as a teenager, it just all came plummeting down. That’s also when I started drinking and partying.”
When she reconnected with Minke years after they met at boarding school, she helped Cara on her road to sobriety. The model admitted that her girlfriend was “the type of person who has boundaries, and there came a point with me when she wasn’t going to have it much longer.” Cara admitted that Minke’s steadfastness “was a blessing in disguise” that helped her get sober.
“It’s the first time I feel like I’m in a relationship not trying to rescue someone,” she added.
They shared the 2022 holiday season together, marking the first time Cara had been sober for Christmas and New Year’s Eve since she started drinking. “It was just the two of us,” she said. “I was in bed by 12:15 a.m. on New Year’s Eve having the nicest time.”
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