Amy Kaufman: No, Emily Ratajkowski won't just shut up and look pretty
Emily Ratajkowski knows that everyone is looking at her. Or maybe she doesn't, because she's never not being looked at. On Instagram, walking down the street or here, backstage at a New York Fashion Week show. All those eyes, desiring, judging, calculating.
As a model who rose to fame in the Instagram age, and wrote a bestselling book about what it was like, she has learned to deal with the collective gaze by turning inward. She stands at the back of a line of 34 other models, in position to close the Simkhai runway show in an oversize bedazzled blazer and combat boots. Photographers approach her, and she poses dutifully.
"Every angle is giving. Sickening. She's fierce," one says. She doesn't respond, just keeps offering different angles of her face to the camera. The other models, newer to the industry, gather in clusters, excitedly discussing the other brands they're walking for in the coming days. Ratajkowski exchanges pleasantries but doesn't join any of the conversations.
An onlooker is staring at Ratajkowski while trying to pretend she isn't. "I didn't know she was gonna be here," the woman whispers to a friend. "She's, like, one of the top five models."
Ratajkowski doesn't hear this. It's like there's an orb around her, a protective shield she has generated for self-preservation. At age 31, the sense of calm is new to her, something that has emerged in the wake of the dissolution of her marriage and becoming a single mother.
"I don't even feel my heart rate go up in the way that I used to," she says. "The anxiety doesn't hit me so much, because I'm very clear on how I see the world and what the truth is."
That truth, as the world is learning, is dark. On March 29, sexual misconduct allegations against her estranged husband, "Uncut Gems" producer Sebastian Bear-McClard, became public. In statements obtained by Variety that were made in connection with a legal dispute, Bear-McClard was accused of sexual misconduct and grooming, some of which allegedly occurred while he was married to Ratajkowski.
After she filed for divorce in September, gossip blogs rampantly speculated that she'd ended the relationship because Bear-McClard cheated on her. But she never addressed the rumors with any of the hundreds of outlets that track her every move.
Instead, she moved on, into a new place in New York City's West Village that she shares with her best friend from high school and into a high-profile dating life. She reportedly went out a few times with Brad Pitt. By November, she and Pete Davidson — fresh off his split with Kim Kardashian — were going to New York Knicks games together. Shortly after New Year's, she started seeing comedian Eric
