Emily O’Hara Ratajkowski was born on June 7, 1991, in Westminster, London, to American parents who were living in the UK at the time. The family returned to the United States soon after and settled in Encinitas, California, a coastal town near San Diego, where she was raised. Her father, John David “J.D.” Ratajkowski, worked as a high school art teacher and painter, and her mother, Kathleen Balgley, taught English at the University of California, San Diego.

Ratajkowski signed with Ford Models’ junior division at age 14 and spent her teenage years modeling locally while attending San Dieguito Academy in Encinitas. She enrolled at UCLA to study fine art but left after one year, in 2009, to pursue modeling and acting full-time.

Ratajkowski’s professional modeling debut came on the March 2012 cover of the underground fashion magazine treats!, a shoot that put her in front of casting directors working outside the traditional agency system. That exposure led, the following year, to her being cast in the music video for Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” released in March 2013.

The video, in which Ratajkowski appears topless alongside two other models, became one of the most-viewed and most-discussed music videos of the decade and made her recognizable well beyond the modeling industry almost overnight. She has since described it in blunter terms than most career-making moments get: according to The Hollywood Reporter’s coverage of her comments, Ratajkowski called the video “the bane of my existence,” even while acknowledging it was the project that launched her career.

The visibility from “Blurred Lines” directly led to her breakout film role the following year, as Andie Fitzgerald, the mistress of Ben Affleck’s character, in David Fincher’s psychological thriller Gone Girl (2014) — a part that established her as more than a music-video face and opened the door to a parallel acting career.

On the modeling side, Ratajkowski joined the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue’s rookie class in 2014, shot in St. Lucia, and returned for a second appearance in Hawaii in 2015, according to SI Swimsuit’s archive of her shoots; she has continued to appear in fashion and swimwear editorials in the years since.

Her film and television credits expanded through the mid-2010s with a starring role opposite Zac Efron in the EDM drama We Are Your Friends (2015), a self-parody cameo in Entourage (2015), a supporting role in the Amy Schumer comedy I Feel Pretty (2018), and Welcome Home (2018) opposite Aaron Paul. Frustrated with how the industry treated her, she stepped back from acting in the early 2020s before returning in 2025 in a leading role on Lena Dunham’s Netflix series Too Much — a part Dunham wrote specifically for her, per Variety’s interview with Ratajkowski, and one CBS News described as a deliberate return to acting after several years away from film sets.

Ratajkowski’s writing career developed alongside her modeling and acting work. Her 2020 essay “Buying Myself Back,” published in The Cut, examined her complicated relationship with images of her own body, including artist Richard Prince’s unauthorized use of one of her Instagram photos in his gallery show. She expanded that essay into the memoir My Body, published by Metropolitan Books in November 2021, which became a New York Times bestseller.

Unlike some of her modeling peers, Ratajkowski has never appeared on Forbes’ or other outlets’ published rankings of the highest-earning models, and no single audited annual income figure for her has ever been made public. Her income is instead documented through a series of individually reported deals and one-off events rather than one consolidated number.

Those documented figures include a $175,000 sale at Christie’s in 2021 for her NFT artwork “Buying Myself Back: A Model for Redistribution,” confirmed by CNN’s coverage of the sale, and a seven-figure advance for her forthcoming second memoir, reportedly titled Mother F*cker, which Penguin Press acquired in a 12-way auction in July 2026, according to Deadline’s reporting on the deal. Modeling day rates, campaign fees, and Inamorata’s revenue are not publicly disclosed, so her actual combined annual income in any given year cannot be stated with precision.

As with most working models, the dollar values of Ratajkowski’s individual modeling and campaign contracts have not been publicly disclosed by the brands involved. She has fronted multiple seasonal campaigns for Marc Jacobs, including the label’s Spring 2025 “MarcWorld” campaign for its Dual handbag, according to WWD’s coverage of the campaign, extending a relationship with the brand that began with her runway debut at its Spring 2016 New York Fashion Week show.

Her two book deals are the most concretely documented contracts in her career: Metropolitan Books published My Body in 2021 on undisclosed advance terms, while Penguin Press paid a reported seven-figure sum for her second book after a competitive, 12-way auction, per Deadline’s reporting cited above. Neither publisher has broken out the exact advance amount publicly.

Beyond runway and campaign work, Ratajkowski has been a recurring face for DKNY, including the brand’s Spring 2018 intimates campaign, and has appeared at beauty and haircare brand activations such as Kerastase’s “Kerastase Club” event. As with her modeling contracts, specific endorsement fees for these partnerships have not been publicly disclosed.

Her large social media following — in the tens of millions across Instagram and other platforms — has also made her a sought-after partner for brand campaigns that blend traditional advertising with influencer-style content. As with most individual influencer deals, exact per-post or per-campaign rates for this work are not independently verifiable, so no specific figures are estimated here.

In November 2017, Ratajkowski launched Inamorata, a swimwear label she co-founded with a childhood friend, starting with a small collection of bikini separates and one-pieces. The brand has since expanded into lingerie, loungewear, and shapewear, according to Forbes’ 2020 profile of the business, which also reported that Inamorata is self-funded, privately owned through Ratajkowski’s own holding company, marketed almost entirely through her personal Instagram, and has been profitable since launch — though the brand does not publicly disclose revenue figures. Her work building Inamorata contributed to her selection for Forbes’ 2020 30 Under 30 list in the Art & Style category.

Ratajkowski has also treated her own image and likeness as an asset to be actively managed rather than simply licensed to others. Her 2021 “Buying Myself Back” NFT project, which sold at Christie’s for $175,000, was framed explicitly as an attempt to reclaim control over — and be compensated for — an image of herself that had previously been used commercially without her permission, per Artnet News’ coverage of the sale.

In 2018, shortly before her marriage to Sebastian Bear-McClard, Ratajkowski paid $2 million for a mid-century home in the Echo Park/Elysian Heights section of Los Angeles, a roughly 1,650-square-foot, three-bedroom property built in 1946, according to Dirt’s report on the purchase. She later listed the property for $2.2 million in 2022 following her separation.

Separately, Ratajkowski and Bear-McClard drew press attention over a rent dispute at a NoHo loft in Manhattan, where, per The Real Deal’s reporting, the couple occupied the unit under New York’s loft law and were later paid an undisclosed sum by the building’s owner to vacate after roughly two years without paying full rent — an arrangement that generated headlines but does not represent a real estate asset in the conventional sense. Beyond the confirmed Echo Park purchase, we have not been able to verify a current, individually-owned property with a reliable public source, so no further real estate is listed here; multiple reports describe her as renting in New York City since her 2022 separation.