#PHARRELL IN MY MIND BOOK PLUS#
When she and her boyfriend broke up, she bought his half of the painting, plus an extra $10,000 for the study. Asked to clarify, a rep for Ratajkowski told Vanity Fair, “She bought a Prince piece for $80,000, the cost of which she split with her boyfriend.”) ( Artnet later reported that Ratajkowski and her then boyfriend commissioned the portrait. Her boyfriend at the time paid for the other half, and she also received a small study of the work. A Gagosian employee bought the one Prince did of Ratajkowski, so she got a different portrait of herself, paying for half the over $80,000 price tag. In one instance, Richard Prince included her in a show at Gagosian gallery in New York, for which he blew up Instagram posts on large canvases, alongside a comment he had left there. She has paid huge sums of money to regain a version of ownership of those images, hence the title of the piece. Last year, Ratajkowski published “Buying Myself Back” in New York magazine, an essay that recounts three moments where she lost control of her photos. The story and its real-life afterword are an ouroboros of reflection and ownership, a kind of nonbiodegradable hazardous byproduct of living now as a model in an era when image, or more precisely the ownership of image, is everything. And then there is My Body, which undergirds it all-especially “Buying Myself Back,” an essay about trading her image back and forth, which doesn’t seem like it will ever have a happy ending, or any ending at all, considering that the story we’re about to get into has only continued on in real life outside the book of essays. She’s signed onto fewer movies, but launched a swimwear brand, Inamorata, in 2017, vertically integrating her modeling into her own brand, and it’s been humming along ever since, even expanding to clothing. In March, she gave birth to a son, Sly, who she had with her husband, Safdie brothers favorite producer Sebastian Bear-McClard. In the last year, she’s turned 30 and entered a new phase of her career and life. So besides how things look, control, creative or otherwise, is something Ratajkowski has devoted her 10,000 hours thinking about. Thinking about their preconceived ideas about me and using that as a tool in the experience of reading it.” And I liked using the real associations that people have in a conceptual way so that it would inform the book once they started it. My name is sort of synonymous with an image of my body and the Instagrams and ‘Blurred Lines’ and whatever else. I knew that a lot of people would roll their eyes at the title and think like, Oh, Emily Ratajkowski, wrote a book called My Body. “How it’s perceived, how I’ve used it, how it’s been used, what access it’s granted me, how it’s also made me at times feel like I’m nothing more than a body. “All of these are stories about my body in different ways,” Ratajkowski said of the collection on a Zoom call about a month before its November 9 release. This is a person who understands how things will look.
Her publisher, Metropolitan, went for it, which, though those things are often out of an author’s hands, was probably smart thinking. She insisted in her proposal that it should be called My Body and the jacket should only bear text.
The model decided how her essay collection would be packaged. The thing that her body will not be selling, though, is her book. It’s sold pants when it wasn’t even trying to, when it was just walking down the street. It’s sold inexpensive clothes and mid-range clothes and luxury clothes. It’s sold a range of hair products and at least one “innovative lifestyle beauty brand.” It’s sold a few lines of intimates and untold numbers of swimsuits. It’s sold perfume that smells of the ylang-ylang tree with notes of sandalwood and ambrette seed. Emily Ratajkowski’s body has sold burgers.