Emily Ratajkowski: “Now I’m in charge”

Emily Ratajkowski, with her body, sold burgers. He sold ylang-ylang essence perfumes with notes of sandalwood and ambrette seeds. It has sold a number of hair products and at least one “innovative beauty brand”. He has sold underwear lines and countless swimwear. It has sold inexpensive, mid-range and luxury clothing. He sold pants without even wanting to, just walking down the street. What he won’t sell with his body is his book. On my body (Piemme, pp. 224, € 16.90) will sell it under his name.

The model also chose the packaging of her collection. He insisted on titling it On my body (in English My Body, ed) and not to put images on the cover, but only text. Those are not details that are left to the authors, but its publisher, Metropolitan, agreed, and it was probably a smart move. This is a person who understands how things will look.

“These are all stories about my body, seen from different perspectives,” Ratajkowski said of his book during a call on Zoom about a month before its release on November 9. “How it is perceived, how I used it, how it was used, what it allowed me to access, how at times it made me feel like I was nothing but a body. I knew that seeing the title many would roll their eyes and think: Oh, Emily Ratajkowski wrote a book called On my body. What an originality. My name is now synonymous with my body, images on Instagram and in the video of Blurred Lines and so on. But I liked the idea that people approach the book with their preconceived ideas, the idea of ​​using the associations they make about me as a reading tool ».

Among the essays in the book there is Transactions, a rigorous reflection on what is really exchanged when a person is paid simply to attend an event. And there is Britney/Toxic, about female friendship and what Britney Spears meant to her when she was starting her modeling career. (Spears represented power, mainly: “The way I saw it, there were presidents and there was Britney Spears,” he said.)

From teen model to entrepreneur

Ratajkowski started working as a model at 14. An only child of bohemian parents, she was living outside San Diego when her mother signed the papers. She continued for years, not necessarily driven by passion but by the money she earned and the freedom it granted her. His big break was the appearance, in 2013, in the video of Blurred Lines by Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke, song of the summer of that year. With that video he achieved world fame and his career took off. She was cast in movies. She was paid to attend events and to represent more important and better quality products. But each time, she was chosen to fulfill someone else’s vision.

This year she turned 30 and entered a new phase in her career and life. In March she gave birth to a son, Sly, with husband Sebastian Bear-McClard, the Safdie brothers’ favorite producer. She took part in a few fewer films, but in 2017 she launched a swimwear brand, Inamorata, which then expanded to include clothing. And then there is On my body, which analyzes his entire path, in particular the essay Buying Myself Back on the trade of his image, which does not seem destined to have a happy ending, nor an end of any other kind, considering that in real life the story we are about to tell continues.

The image is mine

Last year, Ratajkowski posted Buying Myself Back in the magazine New York , recounting three moments in which he lost control of his photos and the large sums of money paid to repurchase the property – hence the title of the piece. In one case, artist Richard Prince had included a photo of her in an exhibition at the Gagosian gallery in New York, taking it from the model’s Instagram profile and printing it on canvas. The work was purchased by a Gagosian employee. So she asked Prince to make a second NFT whose list price was $ 80,000, a cost that the model shared in half with her boyfriend at the time, also receiving a small study of the work for free.