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Arizona Muse, fashion’s most bewitching model-mother, talks to Lynn Yaeger in the June issue of Vogue about some very big news.
Living light—that’s my thing right now,” says Arizona Muse, folding her lanky frame into a velvety chair at the café in the Crosby Street Hotel and ordering a cup of Earl Grey tea.
In a remarkably short time, this model, possessor of the most astonishing, inadvertently apt moniker since Shalom Harlow, has captivated fashion audiences with her mysterious luminosity—an almost cat-that-swallowed-the-canary aura lurking under her famously prominent eyebrows, strong features, and blunt-cut hair reminiscent of a piquant Lauren Bacall, if that woman, instead of living the Beverly Hills life with Bogie, were holed up in a flat in Williamsburg.
Muse is contained and soft-spoken, with an old-fashioned reserve. But if she declines with exquisite politeness to entertain certain lines of inquiry (was she at least a bit ambivalent about becoming pregnant at nineteen? Is she looking for a partner now?), she betrays an unalloyed happiness at her latest professional achievement: having just been named a face of Estée Lauder. “It’s still sinking in,” she says, offering a shy grin. “I feel like I represent something massive.” Indeed, “you become more than just a face—you become a voice,” confirms her friend, and fellow Lauder model, Joan Smalls.
Now 23, Muse grew up in Santa Fe, went to a free-thinking Waldorf school, skipped college to try modeling in L.A., and then, four years ago, made the surprising choice to interrupt her career and have a baby. “I didn’t do it deliberately—I wouldn’t have dared to do it on purpose, but I always wanted to be a young mom. My parents were really supportive.” Her son, Nikko, was born in Tucson, where Muse has an extended family of friends; after a year, she came back to New York, baby on board, and was swept straight into a sudden, unanticipated whirlwind.[#image: /photos/5892006db482c0ea0e4dc9b0]|||||| In the beginning, Nikko went everywhere with her. “He has so many stamps on his passport,” she says, smiling. Now Mommy Skypes with him from places like Milan, where she first came to international attention after opening and closing the spring 2011 Prada show. Though clearly besotted with her young man, Muse says she doesn’t recommend that girls be too eager to follow in her footsteps. “It worked out for me, but it could have been easier if I’d waited a little longer.”
Makeup artist Tom Pecheux, the face behind the Lauder faces, says that despite Muse’s classic features, “she’s got a twist, also, in her character and in her personality. She is one of the few girls where you can transform her, but no matter what you do, she’s always herself. It’s what we call a fashion dream.” And though she remains devoted to her job, “she has another life as a mother,” he continues. “She manages to have fashion come to her rather than her coming to fashion.”
As Lauder’s style and image director Aerin Lauder sees it, a healthy sense of balance is “what the brand is all about: relating to women and instilling family values while still being luxurious.”
Fashion may indeed come to her, but Muse is hardly immune to its siren song—she admits that yes, she does care a lot about labels. Today, she is clad in Chloé platform high-tops, black G-Star jeans, and a Haider Ackermann blazer with strict tuxedo lines. Because she hates trying things on (an occupational hazard), she has become an enthusiastic online shopper. (Nikko is almost as excited as she is when the big boxes arrive, and she lets him open them.)
If Muse won’t talk much about her private life—“Are you asking if I am on the prowl?” she laughs when her dating status comes up—she is disarmingly honest about the rigors of her climb to the top. “Everything happened so quickly. I think I didn’t understand what was going on during the first year—the long hours, being with new people every single day, sleeping on planes, only sleeping on planes.” Did she ever feel that it was becoming too much? “No. I’m quite competitive. Not with other models but with myself. I have to win.”
Would she like to act one day? You half expect her to shrug and demur, but there is an unexpected steeliness beneath her bohemian nonchalance, a sense that her future, her potential, is as wide as the southwestern skies her name evokes. “Yes, I think I would,” she says. “Modeling is really silent acting. When we arrive in the morning, we don’t know if we’re going to be asked to be a boy in sneakers or to wear red lips and stilettos.” Or an all-American beauty, no pretending required.