"Wanna go to video?” Until a few weeks ago, I’d never had that request from an interviewee previously. After almost two weeks of coronavirus-enforced national lockdown, however, video calls – specifically via Zoom – are now the new way of connecting, camera to camera, screen to screen, glitchy audio feed to glitchy audio feed. And so here I am, unmuted and all dressed up with nowhere to go (other than the spare room), happily patching in through my laptop to catch up with the 28-year-old model, political activist and soon-to-be author (on which more later) Emily Ratajkowski.
As many content creators are finding, social distancing is playing havoc with our industries and with our usually high-octane output. The magazine industry – a trade whose very essence comes from the alchemy and interaction of physical collaboration, whether interviewing, taking a photograph or styling shoots – has by no means been immune. Bit by bit, as the creative industries have shut down and our friends and colleagues got sick or were told to stay indoors and stop travelling, stop congregating, we’ve had to explore new ways of creating and new paths of collaboration. Despite Ratajkowski’s appearance in this, the Heroes issue, having long been confirmed, by the time we were all told to isolate, neither the photographs nor the interview had actually taken place.
Luckily for us, Ratajkowski is one of the 21st-century’s foremost content queens, wielding her highly curated image and social power (25 million Instagram followers and counting) like few before her. These photographs you see of Ratajkowski before you? All taken by her husband, within the boundaries of her own home, while isolating from Covid-19 with him. Unsurprisingly, as you’ll agree, the results are all killer, no filler. Certainly no filter. And my Zoom interview? Impeccable. Or at least from the waist up, anyway...
Welcome to our strange new, remote, Zoom-only virtual world…
Yeah. It’s really weird. You’re in London, I guess.
Yes. And you’re in New York. How’s the situation there?
You know, [my husband and I] have been a little bit on the fence. My parents are in California, but as we know the responsible thing is to not travel right now. But eventually we would like to make it out there just because, well, New York is the epicentre, although my bodega is still open. I live in Tribeca and it is already very quiet.
What are you doing with your long days indoors? Be kind: I have two children...
Parents deserve some sort of medal or trophy at this time. I’m serious. I mean, one of my best friends, I was FaceTiming with her last night and she’d set our wine date for 8.15pm. She has a daughter at home who’s nine, so they have to be in the room to help her with school assignments and so on. Come bedtime and her daughter just wouldn’t fall asleep; she kept coming into the room like, “Mom, what are you doing?” Great birth control, I guess.
You’re isolating with your husband [film producer Sebastian Bear-McClard, who has worked recently on Uncut Gems with Adam Sandler and Good Time with Robert Pattinson]. How has being married changed your outlook on life?
It’s been interesting being in quarantine and married. I feel like a lot of people will end up divorced. But my husband and I are in a good partnership. And I think that I’ve learned a lot about myself being married, for sure.
How are you coping with the anxiety and stress?
I think that’s the hardest part: this looming kind of threat that’s everywhere. Obviously, the numbers are going up every day and I know two people who have tested positive, but it doesn’t really feel like it’s hit yet. It’s more like there’s no way to know how long this is going to go on for or the severity of it. I think that’s producing the anxiety in most people.
You run a fashion brand, Inamorata. How has the coronavirus impacted your business?
We’re really proud that most of our stuff is not made in China, but LA factories are closed; the Brazil one just closed. So we’re trying to assess our next steps. We’re really lucky because we [sell] only direct to consumers, not wholesale. So in some way the business was set up for this. We’re still selling right now. But we’d just got a new office space in January and hired two more team members this year, so this wasn’t part of the dream, no. We basically do launches every two or two-and-a-half weeks, so everything’s now shifted. To be honest, we have always been making it up as we go along anyway.
It seems very successful for a business you’re just making up...
I do not come from a business background. My dad is a teacher and my mum’s a writer; everyone in my extended family are doctors and lawyers and there’s really no one who has ever run their own business. I don’t want to say I was the first, but I definitely was one of the earliest [to work in this way]. Brands were hiring me to do my own content to promote their product. So I did a couple of licensing deals with great brands and I was getting a very small yet decent percentage of profits. I started to get these cheques for content that I was essentially directing and designing myself and it got me thinking: “If what I get is a small percentage, then these companies must be doing really well...” Every time I would post something for a brand – I’d be wearing a shirt or whatever, or a bathing suit – people would ask me, “Where can I get that?” At a certain point it would have been crazy for me to just continue to promote other people’s brands and not start my own.
How has developing a brand, getting older and wiser, allowed you to deal with criticism?
I think as you get older, as a woman especially, you develop a sense of self that helps. But figuring out who you are, what you want to do and what you want to give to the world is something that usually people get to do in the privacy of their twenties – that process was not private for me. But that’s OK. I feel really good about the fact that everything I’ve ever put out has been highly curated. What you see online is not my whole life. I think that sometimes people think they know everything about me. “Oh, we know all about your dog...” or “We see your husband...” But that’s not really who I am. It’s a magazine or it’s an editorial, you know? I’m proud of the fact that I protected myself and did the work of privately figuring out who the fuck I am.
I hear you’ve been writing...
I’m working on a book of essays. I have probably ten. But I’m trying to perfect them; that’s one of the main things I’ve been doing [in isolation]. For me, it’s been the one benefit of corona that’s been interesting. I had planned to take until mid-April to edit these essays. I have 160 pages, all in draft. I have an agent and I’m going through his one sheet of notes. All I needed was no distractions and I promised myself I was going to tell everyone to just leave me to work and get them done. Now look.
Are you writing fiction or nonfiction?
Nonfiction. I’d say it’s like a memoir, but with added political thinking. I’m trying to use my experience as a model and someone who has capitalised on their image and also someone who has been maybe a victim of their image. It’s complicated. I am looking at all that through a feminist perspective and just trying to decipher some of the answers. I don’t have them all yet; maybe I never will.
Where do you write during isolation?
The best writing I do is as I’m falling asleep. I take notes on my phone and I will write down anecdotes on a topic. I’ll just write them as they come; a flow of consciousness. And then usually I will look at them the next morning and, hopefully, some of it will make sense. Then I do a lot of really bad writing, where I basically fill out each of those sentences I took down as notes and hate myself. I’ll be like, “Oh, this is terrible! What are you doing with your life?” But I will get to a rough draft. The next day I go back and read through and realise some of it isn’t actually too bad. I’ll line edit, rebuild paragraphs and reorder the structure. It’s a constant beating; exhausting and totally unrewarding, but I love it. Now, with my book due, I feel a lot more pressure to write well than, say, if I was doing a blog or an assignment for class.
Do you have any regrets about how you’ve put your own image forward?
I mean, I don’t really think “regret” would be the right word. I think as a young woman you learn your value and your worth in really specific ways and that is a lot of trial and error. I don’t regret anything, but are there things that I think, you know, were a case of trial and error for me? Yes. But also, you know, were they my fault?
Did you feel starting out as a model aged 17 or 18 that you had enough guidance from the industry?
I got zero guidance. I also don’t think I totally knew what I was getting myself into – at all. I think it’s such a weird thing, the way our culture values fame and beauty – it’s blinding. And I think when you’re 20 years old, it can be especially disorienting. But I think that those were really important lessons I learnt. There’s no way I would be where I am today without taking all those different roads. I am exploring myself because the truth is no one really has any answers. You have to figure it out. And my only advice for any young woman starting out in this industry would be to really trust your gut and know your value.
People with particular aesthetic attributes, whether they be considered very pretty or very glamorous or very uninhibited, can often come under fire, unfairly, for wanting to pursue other interests. Do you run on a keen desire to prove people wrong?
I think, for me, the way I use my image and as a model and capitalise off of it has been very much about survival, rather than a representation of who I am. Modelling was an amazing way to make money and gain stability; fame came with that and it was a bizarre thing. Fame wasn’t something I had really expected or really wanted – although deep down probably every 20-year-old girl wants to be famous a little bit. I was confused by some people’s reaction for a long time. People saying, “You can’t do all these things.” It taught me a lot about sexism and misogyny in the world, because the idea that a woman who looks a certain way or presents herself a certain way can’t talk about politics or read books? Ridiculous. I remember in an interview I gave years ago, I had mentioned I liked reading and in the piece the journalist explained how he went home and his girlfriend said to him, “Do you think she’s really read all those books?” I mean, that’s sexist! Nowadays someone would call that out. It just goes to show how deep some of our ideas about women run. You know, I fall victim to those ideas too. Did you read Demi Moore’s memoir?
I did actually.
I realised I had made assumptions about Demi Moore too. I definitely wrote her off a little bit, as an actress, because she was so sexy, because she had that body. And I’m Em Rata, so that’s seriously ironic. It just goes to show how deeply internalised misogyny is.
You’re becoming more and more involved in politics, not least in your support of Bernie Sanders’ policies. There are reports the financial impact of Covid-19 may harm Donald Trump’s prospects of remaining president...
I mean, I would love that. So much of the conversation and the things that Bernie has been talking about for years are suddenly coming to the forefront. People who have always said that they don’t like socialism now [hate] big government more than ever. That being said, I think there is something true to Trump becoming what’s called our “wartime president”. I think a lot of people are really scared. It’s too early to say and I don’t have predictions, but I would not be so sure that this is going to be the end of Donald Trump; it could be quite the opposite.
What’s the average New Yorker’s take on Trump’s drive to get everyone back to work as quickly as possible? Perhaps too soon?
I think people are really afraid of multiple things. This pandemic has created a domino effect. One of the things that I’ve felt during this whole thing is gratitude, because I don’t live paycheque to paycheque and realising just how many people do – it’s staggering. It’s really difficult because you have the health and safety risk [of the virus] and then you also have an economic risk. If anything, the fallout from coronavirus has shone a bright light on the fact that we have such a fragile system that can fall apart in two seconds. I just hope our country can learn from it.
Personally, I am staggered that America can still vote for someone like Donald Trump, in the face of his recent behaviour.
I am actually not. And this is a thing that my “left” friends sometimes get really mad at me about. My feeling is [Trump’s] re-election prospects are just a response to moderate politics. It’s the same thing that happened with Brexit; the choice to keep things as they are, centre, or vote for change and move to the right. And when you look at most working people’s realities they are interested in “How do I feed my kids?” or “How do I pay my rent?” They aren’t interested in trans rights or trans bathrooms – they are just trying to survive. When a politician comes in and says, “We’re just going to keep things the same; we’re going to keep studying, keep going as we were,” and, well, then “the centre cannot hold”. And that’s the truth. That’s why I think Bernie is so important, to offer a more extreme left alternative instead of this moderate ideology that is just not working for a lot of people. And I think it’s only going to get more extreme. Corona or not, the idea of the 99 per cent versus the one per cent isn’t going to go away. In fact, the failing economy is only going to widen the gap.
When did you first become aware of Bernie Sanders?
I talked about this on Michael Moore’s podcast and I think it explains why so many young people support Bernie Sanders. I became radicalised going into college. You know, college is expensive. I went to UCLA for a year and I majored in art and, luckily, I was able to pay for my tuition because I was modelling. The reason I left school was because I could see that my financial prospects would be a lot better by modelling than if I graduate with an insane student debt and move into my parents’ garage. So that was the first red flag. Then there was the Occupy movement in LA, while I was living in downtown Los Angeles. That was the first time when I was really exposed to the ideas that capitalism might not be the best model for everyone.
Did you buy into Barack Obama’s vision?
I had been an Obama supporter. That was the first election I ever voted in. I was working in journalism at my high school newspaper and covered it. It was this beautiful moment and I cried, my parents cried and then we watched as Obama’s policies just sort of got more and more moderate. It was really disappointing. When Hillary was the nominee I was like, “OK. She is going be your next president after Obama.” Like everyone, I was so sure of that; there was no debating it. The RNC was a mess. She was our No1 candidate. We had the first black man, now we’re going to have the first woman. It was amazing. But, in truth, I had already felt critical of the Clinton administration and actually, as a woman, had a lot of issues with how Hillary and Bill had handled his problems to do with women. Also, digging deeper, I was not a fan of their policies. So, for me, I never felt an allegiance with the Clintons. When Bernie emerged, it was this really exciting moment. In 2016, I got involved with his campaign. I went to New Hampshire and I spoke at a rally and I met Senator Sanders. That was the beginning of our relationship.
Did you not feel obliged to vote to support Hillary, as she was a women?
It’s not about just having a woman as president for the sake of it. I wouldn’t have voted for Sarah Palin, for example. We need someone who, of course, has the interests of women at heart. So [2016] was, you know, obviously a very insane election, but when Bernie came back around again this year I was really excited to get on board.
Would you describe yourself as a socialist?
I’m not sure I would describe myself as socialist, no. I think a lot of people are scared of the word “socialism”, for no good reason really. I think capitalism is far more dangerous, if I’m being honest with you. For me, Bernie is all about quality of life and not just benefiting the few. He can represent real progress. Many see him as radical, although next to Trump how much more radical can you get? Maybe not his corporate policies but otherwise. Radical just means “getting to the root” – it’s a simplification. In my view, to beat someone like Trump, who is radically to the right, you can’t do it with someone in the middle, someone moderate. You need someone who is radically to the left.
Can the good guy ever win, though? That’s really the question.
I don’t know. I try not to think like that. Everyone was so sure Trump wouldn’t win and look what happened there. Before Trump got in, people on both coasts were asking if the Republican Party would even survive that election. So anything is possible, right?
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