Emily Ratajkowski has returned to social media with a series of revealing holiday photographs from Mallorca, just days after facing fierce criticism over a shoot for New York Magazine in which she posed topless appearing to breastfeed a doll while drinking wine.
The 35-year-old model shared the Mallorca images without comment on the backlash, captioning her new snaps simply: “back on my favorite island and trying out some new ones too.” The photographs showed her in a plunging black bikini and low-cut beach dress at lunch, a floral bikini, and a red mesh dress worn braless with only a thong underneath.
The new images follow the significant controversy sparked by her New York Magazine shoot, taken to promote her essay for The Cut. In those images, Ratajkowski wore only a leather jacket while appearing to breastfeed a doll. Fans flooded the comments with criticism. “This is so uncomfortable. It doesn’t even seem like art,” one wrote. “What is going on with people? That photo is genuinely disturbing,” said another. Others accused her of “sexualising breastfeeding” and using a baby as a prop, with comments including “girl no,” “this is sad honestly,” and “I adore you but wtf?”
The shoot was designed to accompany Ratajkowski’s candid personal essay, in which she described her transition from “Madonna” to “w****” in the wake of her 2022 divorce from film producer Sebastian Bear-McClard, with whom she shares three-year-old son Sylvester. In the piece, she wrote that six months after Sylvester was born, she and her husband stopped having sex, and less than a year later they separated. When the split became public, a source told Page Six that Bear-McClard had been “a serial cheater,” claims Ratajkowski appeared to acknowledge by liking a tweet referencing infidelity.
In the essay, Ratajkowski described the period that followed as one of deliberate personal reinvention through a series of high-profile flings, including with Pete Davidson, Eric Andre and DJ Orazio Rispo. She was also photographed kissing Harry Styles in Tokyo in March 2023, a moment that a Daily Mail source said left Styles’s ex, Olivia Wilde — reportedly a friend of Ratajkowski’s — feeling it was a “betrayal.” She also sidestepped rumours linking her to Brad Pitt.
Writing in The Cut about her mindset at the time, Ratajkowski described adopting the persona of a femme fatale as a form of self-protection. “The character I’d learned to embody after my divorce, in my period of compulsively dating, was a villain: Poison Ivy. Catwoman. Sexual but scary. And she drank gin martinis. Many, many gin martinis. She was not tragic. Nothing close to a victim. No one needed to feel sorry for her. In fact, they should all be jealous,” she wrote. She added that she had decided to “f*** my way into a new kind of woman,” and wanted to “destroy the Madonna” she had previously worked hard to embody.
