Even compared to Kanye West's usual wardrobe of wacky shades and marching-band jackets, it's impossible not to ogle his latest accessory: a tall, striking, bald woman who shares his fondness for dark glasses, fashion shows, and flashy clothes. It takes a lot to upstage both Kanye
and the catwalk, but Amber Rose has managed to do exactly that, appearing out of nowhere to gallivant from New York to Milan to Paris on Kanye's arm in a series of ever-tighter pants that instill in us a new appreciation for breathable fabrics. It's been weeks of this, yet somehow, one burning question remains: Seriously, people, who IS this person?
Not since George Clooney plucked Sarah Larson from cocktail-waitress obscurity has an unknown become so famous so quickly. But where it took about an hour for People and Us to dig into Sarah's background and deem her George's true love, Kanye and Amber have largely escaped the microscope, save for vague photo captions or blog posts. It's little wonder: Googling "Amber Rose" yielded — in order — a listing for a Dayton, Ohio, restaurant; a website for a Christian ministry; an author's site promoting Bee in Balance: A Guide to Healing the Whole Person With Honeybees, Oriental Medicine, & Common Sense; the MySpace page of a musician claiming she was conceived "on the Sunset Strip in the wake of Hailey's Comet"; a beer site; and a Vermont fleece manufacturer. We assume our Amber Rose is involved with none of those things, though we wish Kanye were dating the holistic bee lady, if only to hear him evangelize a magical bee-and-logic cocktail that soothes inner pain.
Wikipedia hasn't heard of her either — apocalyptic, considering there are entries for everything from the song "Merry Christmas, Jakey Boy," to the popular family hobby Naked Hiking. Undeterred, we sleuthed until we gleaned a few other tidbits: Prior to basking in the glow of Kanye's coif, Amber starred as The Hot Chick in a few music videos, most notably Ludracris's "What Them Girls Like." Bloggers flagged Rose as a model, and although that's often a vague label slapped on anonymous attractive women when people can't figure out what else she does, we did unearth Rose's recent Maxim-esque shoot for Smooth magazine (much deeper googling than we'd intended to do). Unfortunately, the lack of other hard facts has led to rampant, occasionally nasty online speculation that's tough to confirm. We've read that she's a stripper, a beard, a bisexual or lesbian who dramatically dumped a girl to be with Kanye, and Rihanna's best friend. RiRi, naturally, has been too preoccupied to confirm this.
In this day and age, it seems impossible that we’ve spied endless articles about Kanye and Amber shopping for pants, yet her past is a relative vacuum. In the absence of answers, we can only speculate: Is she, as she appears, the overlord of an alien biker gang? Is she performance art? Sweet Jesus, is she his muse? Will his yet-to-materialize fashion line be based on her skintight, rubberized aesthetic? Is Kanye prepping us for a revelatory MTV reality show and/or a spinoff of The Hills, in which Amber liquefies Spencer's brain into a milkshake, thereby making her a national hero and our next head of Homeland Security? Or is this all just a Kanye West scheme to create a celebrity out of nothing, and make a mystery more interesting than the solution itself? At this point, we're rooting for the latter, because no truth could possibly entertain us as much as this conjecture does. Perhaps denying our thirst for knowledge will turn out to be the greatest gift to us, and to pop culture, that Amber Rose will ever give.
