If the Academy Awards ceremony is where Hollywood reaches for timeless elegance, the Vanity Fair Oscar afterparty is where it loosens its collar and gets interesting. Emily Ratajkowski has built a reputation as one of the most reliably daring dressers at this particular event, and her appearance this year continued that tradition without missing a beat. The model arrived in a sleek velvet gown featuring a plunging neckline and dramatic side cutouts positioned to reveal strategic flashes of skin. The overall effect was exactly what the Vanity Fair afterparty crowd has come to expect from her: confident, polished, and designed to generate conversation.
Ratajkowski’s track record at this specific party reads like a master class in high-impact after-dark dressing. In 2025 she turned up in a sheer lace gown by Ludovic de Saint Sernin, the kind of piece that photographs beautifully under flashbulbs and leaves very little ambiguity about the wearer’s intentions. The year before that, she chose a sculptural ivory piece from Jacquemus, a brand known for its architectural approach to the female form. Her 2023 look pushed things even further with a completely sheer silver design by Feben, a choice that firmly cemented her status as the afterparty’s most dependable boundary-pusher.
The Vanity Fair look arrived at a moment when Ratajkowski has been particularly visible on the international fashion circuit. Earlier in the year she walked in Gucci’s Fall runway show in Milan, where she modeled a rhinestone-covered silver minidress that captured the collection’s early-2000s party energy. She described the show as successfully bridging the label’s storied heritage with the direction it is heading, a rare kind of balance that few houses manage to pull off convincingly. Paris Fashion Week brought a different side of her entirely, as her appearance at the Dior Fall show saw her pivot to a crisp white halter top and structured black trousers, demonstrating that her range extends well beyond the high-voltage glamour she tends to favor at afterparties.
emily ratajkowski at the vanity fair oscar party pic.twitter.com/qn7DeKA76g
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Beyond the runway, Ratajkowski has kept busy with brand work that reflects the more intentional, values-driven chapter her career has entered. A recent campaign for Tory Burch leaned into a light academia aesthetic, positioning her in a register quite removed from the overtly sensual image she built in her earlier career. She confirmed her relationship with French film director Romain Gavras in February, making their debut as a couple officially public via Instagram. She is also a mother to five-year-old son Sylvester, and the combination of her modeling, advocacy work, and ongoing role as an author means her schedule operates at a pace that would exhaust most people.
It is worth remembering just how much ground Ratajkowski has covered since she first entered the public consciousness. She rose to widespread recognition after appearing in the ‘Blurred Lines’ music video in 2013, and her subsequent move into acting included a notable role in ‘Gone Girl.’ In recent years, however, she has leaned increasingly into her identity as a writer and entrepreneur, with her essay collection ‘My Body’ functioning as something of a public reckoning with the industry that made her famous. The book was praised for its candor about the ways in which women’s bodies become sites of commerce and control, and it remains one of the more substantive things to emerge from the celebrity memoir genre in recent memory. Her choices in fashion, from sheer Feben to structured Dior, increasingly read as extensions of that ongoing conversation about ownership and self-definition rather than simply outfit decisions.
What makes her Vanity Fair appearances so consistently watchable is the sense that she is not dressing to impress the room so much as to hold a conversation with it. The velvet gown with side cutouts fits that pattern perfectly, using an otherwise classic silhouette as a vehicle for something more assertive. There is a knowingness to it that separates her from the crowd of celebrities who simply show up in whatever their stylist handed them. At an event famous for its fashion moments, she has somehow managed to become a recurring anchor of its visual identity across multiple years running.
The Vanity Fair Oscar Party has been held annually since 1994, making it one of the longest-running post-ceremony traditions in the industry, and it has generated so many fashion photographs over the decades that it functions almost as its own editorial archive of celebrity style evolution. Velvet has historically been one of the most technically demanding fabrics to work with in fashion design, as it resists draping in the same way softer fabrics do and tends to show every imperfection in fit, which makes a well-constructed velvet gown a genuine statement of craft. And Emily Ratajkowski is one of very few celebrities who can claim to have been photographed at this same party across enough years to have something approaching a retrospective at this point.
What do you think of Emily Ratajkowski’s style evolution over the years? Share your thoughts in the comments.
