S T Y L E & D E S I G N
I Am So Amused
Even in the world of high fashion, having a muse on the payroll seems wonderfully extravagant.
By Joel Stein
Spring 2004 Style & Design
For my six years at TIME, I have been confident about the fact
that I have the easiest job in the world. Then I heard that
fashion designers employ muses, people they keep on salary just
to inspire them. If those were the rules in normal life, I would
still owe Playboy money from when I was 15.
Jealous, angry and more than a little interested in what one of
these muses looks like, I canceled an important mid-workday
Foosball game and met Amanda Brooks, the muse of Tuleh, at Cafe
Lebowitz. She looked the part--like a Klimt painting, tall and
thin with wavy golden hair and a Tuleh blouse speckled with drips
of gold--and even trumped my corporate Amex with a magical tab
that Tuleh employees never have to pay, thanks to a barter deal.
Not only do muses not pay for food, but the breakfast was better
than it was the last time I ate there. Fashion muses are
inspiring even to short-order cooks.
Brooks, 29, a Brown graduate and Manhattan socialite with an
easy, blue-blood version of Up with People charm, told me muse
responsibility ranges wildly from house to house. I found that
surprising for a job in which you get paid merely for existing.
But musing can be anything from prancing around the studio, as
Sofia Coppola does for Marc Jacobs, to what Brooks does for Tuleh
designer Bryan Bradley, which includes giving her opinion on
fabrics and designs--something that sounded suspiciously like
work until I found out that Brooks draws little hearts next to
the parts she likes. I like to think Beatrice's copy of The
Inferno was riddled with pink hearts.
Even though it is the coolest job in the world, Brooks admits
it's a little uncomfortable to tell people you spend your day
musing. Many people seem to think the title "muse" disappeared
from the job market around the same time as "serf." "A lot of
people have resistance to muses. They want something tangible:
she answers the phone; she's the human-resources manager," says
Brooks. But despite her job's intangibility, Brooks takes her
responsibility at Tuleh very seriously. Kind of. A mother of two,
she goes into the Tuleh offices, which are half a block from her
apartment, three times a week if she feels like it. "It's my job
to spread love to the seamstress, the financial guy. And if I'm
not in a good mood, I won't go," she says. "In order to be
original, you have to listen to your desires and be indulgent
about getting them. If you're not happy, you can't be a muse. You
have to be yourself. And how can you be yourself if you're taking
the subway to work every day and chained behind a desk? You
become uninspired and therefore not inspiring." I am memorizing
some of these lines to use on my boss.
In fact, Brooks has done some of her best musing when she's not
even around. In a desperate search to find shoes for a show,
Bradley got the keys to her apartment from her doorman so that he
could rummage through her closets. "I don't even have to be there
to inspire him," she explains. Bradley met Brooks after a stylist
put her in a giant Tuleh gown for a fashion-magazine shoot. Since
then Brooks has increased Tuleh's visibility by wearing the
clothing in the shocking number of magazine party pictures she
shows up in. Why Brooks--who I'm pretty sure was never on
Baywatch--appears in so many magazines is not entirely clear to
me.
All I know is that I need a muse. I see her lying lazily on my
desk, eating bags of Cheetos. Her presence, along with the smell
of Cheetos, will somehow make my copy much better. Brooks thinks
this is a great idea, but I fear it won't go over well with my
wife. That's when Brooks suggests her hot friend Valeria, who is
a lesbian. And it is right then that I finally see just how
valuable a muse Brooks is.
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