Emily Ratajkowski Philanthropy: Fashion Model's Charitable Ventures

Emily Ratajkowski's advocacy work is unusual inside the working-supermodel cohort because the advocacy and the modeling career are structurally linked rather than parallel. The 2021 essay collection My Body used her career as the central case study for an argument about consent, body autonomy, and the commercial-image economy. The Planned Parenthood and ACLU partnerships, the 2017 Women's March and the Time's Up engagement, and the post-2023 Gaza ceasefire campaigning sit on the same intellectual foundation that My Body formalised.

This is a working profile of the record.

San Diego, London, and the early career

Emily O'Hara Ratajkowski was born June 7, 1991 in Westminster, London, to Kathleen Balgley, a Polish-American English professor who taught at MiraCosta College, and John David Ratajkowski, an Irish-American painter and high-school art teacher. The family moved to San Diego when she was five. The Mission Beach childhood, the bilingual cultural register, and the academic-and-creative household produced the foundation her later advocacy work has continued to draw on.

The teenage years included a small recurring role on iCarly, the standard San Diego commercial and television circuit, and a brief Ford Models contract. The career-defining moment came with the 2013 Robin Thicke "Blurred Lines" music video, which made her one of the most-discussed visual figures of the year and produced the IMG Models signing soon after. The 2014 David Fincher film Gone Girl extended the acting career alongside the modeling work.

The Women's March and Time's Up, 2017 and 2018

The January 2017 Women's March was the formal entry point into the wider American advocacy infrastructure. Ratajkowski marched in Los Angeles, spoke at the broader programming circuit, and continued the engagement across the 2018, 2019, and 2020 cycles before the organisation's structure shifted in the post-2021 reorganisation.

The Time's Up movement, launched in January 2018 by 300 women in the entertainment industry following the October 2017 New York Times and New Yorker Harvey Weinstein investigations and the wider #MeToo cycle, brought Ratajkowski into formal workplace-rights advocacy. She signed the original Time's Up letter, contributed to the Time's Up Legal Defense Fund administered by the National Women's Law Center, and continued the engagement across the 2018 to 2021 programming cycle. The parallel Glamour Women of the Year and Tina Brown's Women in the World programming brought her into the wider American women's leadership network through the same period.

Planned Parenthood and the ACLU

The Planned Parenthood partnership has been the longest-running advocacy relationship of her career. The 2016 "I Stand With" campaign, the recurring 2017 to 2024 programming engagement, the November 2018 Vogue feature shot by Annie Leibovitz on Planned Parenthood, and the post-Dobbs reproductive-rights work since June 2022 have all run on the same partnership. Her presence at Planned Parenthood gala fundraisers since 2017 has been continuous, and the Dobbs reversal expanded rather than reduced the scope of her work with the organisation.

The ACLU partnership has run parallel to the Planned Parenthood work, with focus on the civil-liberties side of the post-2017 American political cycle. The two partnerships together have anchored the advocacy work that the wider essay-and-interview portfolio draws on.

For the parallel cohort advocacy profiles, our Stella Maxwell philanthropy profile and Behati Prinsloo philanthropy profile cover the comparable approaches at different ends of the cause spectrum.

My Body, November 2021

The November 2021 publication of My Body by Henry Holt and Company was the intellectual consolidation of her broader advocacy. The book became a #2 New York Times Bestseller, was longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and made several end-of-year best-of lists in The New York Times, Time, and The Cut.

The twelve essays in My Body re-read her modeling career as a case study in consent, body autonomy, and the commercial image economy. The "Blurred Lines" 2013 breakout was reframed as a consent question. The "Buying Myself Back" essay on the Richard Prince Instagram appropriation case, originally published in New York Magazine in September 2020, addressed image rights and intellectual property. The "BC Hello Halo" essay on the wider working-model relationship to photographers became one of the more-cited model-side accounts of industry power dynamics published in the past decade. The combined effect was to give a coherent intellectual frame to the public-positioning work she had been doing across the prior five years.

The 2022 High Low with EmRata podcast launch, distributed by Sony Music in a weekly format, extended the My Body arguments into longer-form conversation with writers, academics, and political organisers. The podcast ran for two seasons through 2024 before pausing for the writing of her second book.

The post-2023 Gaza ceasefire campaigning

The October 2023 Hamas attack on Israeli civilians and the subsequent Israeli military campaign in Gaza prompted one of the more substantial single-issue advocacy moves of Ratajkowski's career. She has been one of the more visible American fashion-industry figures consistently campaigning for a ceasefire across the 2023 to 2025 period, with her Instagram, podcast, and essay work directed almost continuously at the humanitarian situation in Gaza, including donations to and amplification of the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund.

The campaigning has carried real career cost. The 2024 Vogue France situation, in which she withdrew from a planned feature after disagreement over an editorial position, was widely reported. Several brand contracts have not been renewed across 2024 and 2025. The work has continued without slowing, and she has been more public than most of her cohort about the trade-offs involved.

The Inamorata business and the Reformation work

The 2017 Inamorata Swim launch and the 2018 Inamorata Woman fashion line expansion brought a parallel commercial business into the career. Inamorata operates as a small DTC fashion business with Ratajkowski as founder and creative director, and it has remained profitable across the 2017 to 2025 window without growing into a scale comparable to Rhode or SKIMS. The 2023 to 2024 Reformation collaboration capsules brought a separate commercial relationship into the calendar.

The commercial work has run alongside the advocacy work without displacing it. The Versace, Bottega Veneta, Saint Laurent, and wider high-fashion runway and campaign cycle has continued through the period, with adjustments where brand positions on specific issues have aligned or misaligned with hers.

What the advocacy record tells you

Three things are worth taking away from this profile.

The advocacy and the working career are structurally linked. My Body used the modeling career as the case study for a wider argument about consent and the image economy. The Planned Parenthood and ACLU partnerships drew on the visibility the modeling career produced. The Gaza campaigning has run through the same channels. The integration has been deliberate, and it has been one of the cleaner cases of a fashion-industry figure using career visibility for sustained political work without collapsing into shallow hashtag activism.

The intellectual-public-positioning work has compounded the career rather than competed with it. The combination of My Body, the High Low podcast, the essay rotation across New York Magazine, The Cut, and Vanity Fair, and the academic and political-press circuit she has built around the work has produced a working brand that the wider cultural industry now recognises. The 2022 Time 100 Next placement was the formal acknowledgement of that position.

The advocacy work has not been free. Brand contracts have ended over the Gaza work. Some doors have closed. The career has continued because the work has been substantive and consistent, which is the only version of celebrity advocacy that has historically held up.

For the parallel commercial work, our Hailey Bieber fashion campaigns profile and Bella Hadid Prada Beauty profile cover comparable career architectures at different ends of the model-celebrity spectrum.

The shorter version is that Ratajkowski has built one of the more substantive advocacy records in the current model cohort, anchored across Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the My Body essay collection, and the post-2023 Gaza work. The integration of the modeling career with the advocacy work is the unusual part. The rest follows from it.