Being Emily Ratajkowski

Model, Actress, Social Media Maven and Activist, Emily Ratajkowski Is Crossing and Blurring the Lines of Celebdom.
 

- Kevin Sessums

During New York Fashion Week, Emily Ratajkowski wore a bubble-gum-pink suit to Altuzarra, then a black crop top and hounds tooth trumpet skirt at Michael Kors. But weeks earlier at Milk Studios in Los Angeles, the model and actress was wearing a pair of jeans hastily rolled up to mid-calf and a sleeveless black T-shirt, looking like any kid window shopping on Melrose and dreaming of maybe being the kind of girl who would be invited to a fashion show.

“I’m super-visual. I grew up with beautiful images and paintings and sculpted figures and colour and design,” she tells me that afternoon, recalling her childhood in the beach community of Encinitas, where her mother is a college English professor and her father (whom she took to the Super Bowl this year) is an abstract painter. “For me, fashion is just an extension of that. It is just a costume and the way you can play,” says Ratajkowski who signed with Ford Models when she was just 14.

Although Ratajkowski, 25, cultivates that playful image on Instagram for over 11 million followers, she can be more serious on Twitter (1 million followers), where she takes on anyone from Piers Morgan, who criticised her for a nude photo shoot, to a New York Times journalist who slut-shamed Melania Trump.