EMILY RATAJKOWSKI Redefining Beauty Standards

Emily Ratajkowski is a model, actress, author and a household name in the fashion industry. She rose to fame after starring in Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” music video in 2013, and has since graced the covers of major fashion magazines and walked the runway for numerous designers. However, Ratajkowski is more than just a pretty face; she is also an outspoken feminist and advocate for body positivity.

It is nine years since the model became famous off the back of the video for Robin Thicke’s hit song Blurred Lines. The debate that song ignited – about consent and the nature of sexiness – raged on through the intervening neardecade, defining Emily’s star as it ascended. She continues to embrace the nuances around it, making both a quasi-feminist statement and a highly lucrative brand identity of it. She wrote a book about it, My Body (‘a portrait of the tension between objectification and empowerment’, according to The Atlantic), launched a swimwear line and built an influential social media presence, one that has merged so completely with her public identity, she’s now more commonly known by her Instagram handle – @emrata – than her actual name.

Despite her success, Ratajkowski has faced criticism for her looks and her outspoken views on feminism. In an interview with InStyle magazine in 2018, she said, “People don’t want to work with me because I’m too sexy. They’re afraid of what that means, of the way that people will perceive me.” However, Ratajkowski has never let criticism get in her way. Instead, she has used her platform to speak out on important issues like women’s rights and body positivity.

Ratajkowski has been a vocal advocate for body positivity and self-acceptance. She said, “I’m very comfortable with my body. I think that’s something that comes with age and experience. I feel like I have a responsibility to other women to show that you can be sexy and confident and comfortable in your own skin.” Ratajkowski has also been critical of the fashion industry’s narrow beauty standards, saying in an interview with Porter magazine, “We need to see more diversity in fashion. It’s not enough to have one token person of colour or one token curvy model. We need to see real diversity.”

Ratajkowski’s comments highlight the double standards that exist in the fashion industry when it comes to women’s bodies. While male models are praised for having chiselled abs and defined muscles, female models are often criticised for being “too curvy” or “not thin enough.” Ratajkowski has been vocal about the need for the industry to embrace diversity and inclusivity, and to stop perpetuating harmful beauty standards.

It’s possible that you’ve heard Emily Ratajkowski is currently in what some may call her “bitch era”. This could be due to her declaration of such on The Today Show with Hoda and Jenna, or possibly because she started her own media company called Bitch Era. Interestingly enough, Bitch Era was also a contender for the name of her podcast, but she ended up choosing the more subdued title of High, Low instead.

“I’m definitely in a givingno-f**ks period of my life,” the 31-year-old says. “I was playing with my son, building his magnet tiles with him, and I was like, ‘Huh, I wonder if I’m going to come out of this period and be like, Damn, I really give a f**k now, and I wish I had handled things differently.’”

Ratajkowski admits that she isn’t going to allow the media buzz to change who she is or how she chooses to navigate the world -- publicly or privately -- and especially on her High, Low podcast. “I felt like I was constantly negotiating things in a way that was making me very meek,” she says. “I’ve stopped caring so much, which is, funny enough, an act of taking control. I’ve accepted what I can and can’t control, and found joy in things that I can. And the podcast is one of them.”

“I grew up listening to radio — podcasts before they were podcasts — because I was always commuting from San Diego to L.A. for modelling when I was in high school. I fell asleep at the wheel a few times. So, the way that I would stay awake was by listening to talk radio because it kept me more engaged than music. I became kind of an NPR head and loved Terry Gross and This American Life particularly. “When podcasts started popping off, my friends and people who are close to me would say, ‘I think you’d be so good at this — you should have a podcast.’ I knew that I wasn’t ready for it. When I started writing the book [My Body], somebody approached me about doing a podcast. I had been writing for about a year and had finally decided I was going to publish. At that point I was like, I think I want to wait until the book is done and it’s out in the world and people understand my POV a little bit more. A year after it was published, we started [the podcast]. It was a perfect evolution.”

Ratajkowski divorced Sebastian Bear-McClard in 2022, after almost four years of marriage. Since her split, the model has been linked to various high-profile men including Pete Davidson, Eric Andre, Brad Pitt and, most recently, Harry Styles. “I got married when I was 27. That was just four years ago, but it feels like a really long time. I think I felt like I was getting older. I think I felt older at 27 than I do at 31. Something was freaking me out. I had this realisation that I was getting closer to 30 and wasn’t going to be young forever. But something about 31, I’m like, I’m so young. I turned to my friend the other day and was like, ‘Did we ever think 30 was old?’ She was like, ‘Bitch, we thought 30 was so old.’ But you have so much time. Yes, life goes fast, but ultimately 27 is so young and it gets better. It got so much better for me. I think you’ll know yourself more. Of course, as young women, [we] feel the pressure of being young forever. But in your 30s, you look the same, but you’ve figured out who the hell you are.”

For the 1.4 million people who follow her on Twitter, the 2.4 million who follow her on TikTok and the 29.9 million who follow her on Instagram, Ratajkowski’s candour and insight into the corrosive sexism at the heart of the entertainment industry has made her an unusual, and unusually compelling, figure.

Ratajkowski has acquired a new fondness for TikTok as a social media platform that truly lets her be herself. As a model and founder of the swimwear line Inamorata, Ratajkowski often sees Meta-owned Instagram as an unavoidable part of her job, while Twitter’s traditionally been a site of “weird, corny men saying weird, scary things.” On TikTok, though, she can just have fun. She can dance with her son and post enticing snippets of events. She can answer an “if you identify as bisexual, do you own a green velvet couch?” prompt by showing off her own green velvet couch, and all that implies, with a casual smirk that says she knows exactly what people might make of it.

“I have a generally complicated relationship to the internet as a celebrity,” she admits. “One of the things I write about in the last essay of the book is about control and kind of understanding that one of the best ways to actually be happy and have some semblance of control is letting go,” she says.

As for letting looser on TikTok, Ratajkowski explains that there’s a curious freedom in being more “unfiltered” than she felt able to on other social media platforms. All you have to strive for is to be as honest and as upfront as you can, and make it feel like people are just in your iPhone camera roll.” In that respect, she says, “I enjoy vulnerability and radical honesty, so TikTok is a perfect medium for that.” “Women seeking attention is always the classic misogyny hot topic. It’s really what gets people going, to accuse a woman of seeking attention. Personally, I know that really well,” she says. “So, yeah, I get a lot of hate. But as they say on TikTok: ‘The girls who get it, get it.’ That’s my motto these days.”