Always Pack a Party Dress: And Other Lessons Learned From a (Half) Life in Fashion

by Amanda Brooks

  “Hello?” I said, slightly suspect of anyone calling that early in the morning.

  “Hi, it’s Larry. Are you taking the job?”

  “Um, I don’t know yet. I am having breakfast with my parents this morning to discuss it.”

  “What do you want? Thirty thousand?”

  I still wasn’t sure that $30,000 was going to make me financially independent, but it was a big increase from his initial offer, and I knew that most of my friends didn’t make that much. I decided that I wanted the job then and there, but something in me instinctively knew to make Larry wait.

  “Thank you. That’s very generous. I will call you later today.”

  Of course, I accepted the job and my parents were delighted that I’d managed to get some more money out of him.

  In many respects, working at Gagosian Gallery was one of the highlights of my career, though I was only just out of college. As an art history major, there was arguably no more prestigious place to work. I met hero after hero of mine, and I was always hopelessly starstruck. I started out being the assistant to Pippa Cohen, the girl who produced all the shows in all three of Larry’s galleries—two in New York and one in L.A.—at the time. Once a show went on the calendar, Pippa would set the wheels in motion to make it all happen. The announcement (gallery-speak for invitation), the press release, the catalogue, the celebratory dinner, even the signage for the gallery walls was orchestrated by Pippa, with my assistance. But as luck would have it, Pippa left her job just as I was getting a handle on the scope of her responsibilities, and I inherited her position. I became the person who would liaise with the artists on most of the details regarding their shows—what typeface to use for the catalogue title, who was on the guest list for the dinner, which art-world luminary gave a quote for the press release, the approval of the color correction for the photograph on the announcement, and which piece would be chosen for the show’s ad in the New York Times. During my two years there, I planned an exhibition for Francesco Clemente and hung out in his iconic studio on lower Broadway; stayed with Sally Mann in her Lexington, Virginia, home, eating hamburgers and watercress salad (grown in her garden) and poring over her unpublished photographs; chatted with David Salle about how many triptychs to include in an upcoming show; and got hung up on by the cranky genius Richard Serra countless times.

  Most treasured of all, I became friends with Cy Twombly. I first met him in St. Barts; Larry had rented a house near Cy’s in St. Barts for two weeks. He asked me to come along to help plan activities and meals for his guests, including his girlfriend and a handful of clients and friends. Cy joined us for most meals, and despite being a bit prickly at first (he once told me I asked too many questions!), I eventually learned how to navigate conversations with him. We sat next to each other quite a bit, and at the end of the two weeks, I could tell he had grown fond of me. A month or so later, Cy invited me down to his house in Lexington, Virginia (yes, the same hometown as Sally Mann’s), to take a look at the new sculptures he was working on. He gave me a tour of his town and his alma mater, Washington and Lee, and we had lunch at the Palm Parlour, his local hangout. After I left, I wrote him a thank-you note using watercolors. When he received it, he called me at the gallery and told me that my use of watercolors had inspired him to paint again after making sculptures for quite a while. He rang again a few months later to say that he’d seen me featured in a fashion spread in Town & Country magazine, and that he felt proud to know me. In addition to being my favorite artist of the twentieth century, Cy Twombly was a lovely man, and I feel so lucky to have known him.

  • • •

  Despite this enviable position in the art world at such a young age, many people who knew Larry Gagosian and the gallery’s reputation wondered how I could work there at all, especially as a young person right out of college. The gallery atmosphere was intense and often harsh. The salespeople were ultracompetitive, the artists were vulnerable, and Larry was brilliant verging on crazy. One minute he’d be shouting at me for not correctly intuiting what he wanted me to do, and the next minute he’d be begging—begging—me to take over his East Hampton guesthouse for the weekend with my boyfriend Christopher and as many friends as I liked so he wouldn’t have to be alone.

  And his whole life was work. On Saturdays, when I was working in the city and he was in the Hamptons wondering what to do with himself, he’d call the gallery incessantly—over and over and over again—just to check in, five minutes, one minute, or even seconds after he last called. I almost always told him the same thing—that the gallery was quiet and not much was going on other than the usual visitors passing through. Sometimes he would call back so quickly, so manically, that he would get embarrassed and hang up just as I answered. He was a lot to handle.

  At first, I thought it was funny. I’d walk into my friend Tara’s office (she was Larry’s assistant) after he’d shouted a stream of obscenities at me, and we’d just start laughing. I told people, and myself, that I loved working at the gallery and that Larry’s behavior didn’t bother me. But after a while, it wasn’t as funny as it once was, and the highs and lows were more extreme. I can handle this, I thought. I’m strong and tough and I won’t let him get to me, try as he may. Some days when he yelled at me I’d just leave and walk home. After the first time, I came to expect the surprisingly sincere apology from him waiting on my answering machine when I got home. One time he even sent chocolates.

  The sculpture catalogue that Cy Twombly signed for me. It says “Amanda, Very Fondly, Cy,” 1998.

  Halfway through my second year, Larry’s unpredictable and often aggressive behavior finally began to affect me. I would find myself yelling at cabdrivers, and wake up feeling dread at the prospect of going in to work. I called in sick a few times, but when I’d worn out that excuse, I started making more and more elaborate excuses for why I was coming to work late or not at all. I am ashamed to admit that I once even claimed that my apartment had been broken into as an excuse for not being able to face work. And on the days when I did pluck up the courage to conquer my resistance, it was increasingly hard to come down from the adrenaline high when I got home in the evening. My boyfriend Christopher was spending most nights at my apartment, usually coming over around eight, in time for dinner. I really needed that first hour at my apartment alone to calm myself down from the manic energy of the day. Occasionally I would walk home—more than sixty blocks!—to let the stress roll off me so I could arrive home in a more sane state. But one day I took a taxi and Christopher was there early. I’d recently given him keys, and he’d just let himself in. It startled me. I didn’t want him to see me in my stressed-out, frenzied state of mind. When I copped to my alarmed reaction, he suggested maybe it was time to move on to another job. My mom was worried, too, and had recently made the same suggestion.

  I was pretty sure I didn’t want to work in the art world forever. I loved my experience but couldn’t see myself as a salesperson, and I didn’t love the idea of curating enough to go back to school for it. I thought about going back to fashion, but I didn’t even know where to begin. I just wanted a break so badly. My parents were very supportive of my leaving Gagosian, but they had made it very clear that they didn’t encourage quitting one job if you didn’t have the next one lined up.

  Then came a particularly bad day at work. A week earlier, we had gone to print with a Warhol “Dollar Signs” catalogue that was to be shown in Los Angeles. It was my job to do the initial sign-off on the catalogue after thoroughly checking it for errors. Melissa, the director of Gagosian, would give the final sign-off before it went to the printer. Everyone signed their initials, and off it went. The morning after the finished catalogues arrived, we looked through them and everyone was happy. The colors were accurate, the text was clear, and the cover looked beautiful. And then after lunch, I heard Larry storming down the hall toward my office. He slammed the catalogue down on my desk and said, “Fuck you. FUCK YOU, AMAND
A!” And stormed out.

  I walked down the hall, shakily, to Melissa’s office. Melissa was—and still is, all these years later—the head director of Gagosian. She’s been Larry’s right hand for more than thirty years, and she is his polar opposite. She is calm, understanding, and laid-back. She was usually the mother hen to all the young women who worked in the gallery, but at this moment, Melissa wasn’t happy with me, either.

  My time in the art world would eventually influence my designing years in fashion. Top: An iconic Seydou Keita photo, 1970s. Bottom: A Tuleh jumpsuit inspired by the above photo, 2003.

  “Sit down,” she said. She pointed to the title page of the catalogue. At the bottom of the page it read GAGOSIAN NEW YORK.

  “Yeah . . .” I said, not understanding the problem.

  “It should say ‘Gagosian Los Angeles.’ That’s where the show is.” Her eyes widened at me in surprise for not noticing it right away.

  “But Gagosian is a New York–based gallery,” I explained. “I thought all catalogues read ‘Gagosian New York’ on the title page.”

  “You should know better. And I will take responsibility for it this time because I signed off on it, too, but if this happens again, there is a line of girls waiting to take over your job.”

  Of course I was responsible for the mistake and deserved to be reprimanded, but I couldn’t get over the “fuck you” that had been shouted at me. I didn’t deserve that, and I knew it. If it had happened the year before, I probably would have laughed after he left the room, or defiantly walked out for the day. But now I was just worn down.

  Christopher was traveling at the time, so I went to my parents’ house that night. I couldn’t sleep, not even in my own bed in my own bedroom. At twenty-three years old, I crawled into bed with my mom and stepfather and finally fell asleep.

  The next day, I walked into Larry’s office and handed in my notice. “Why?” he asked. I didn’t want to pick a fight. I had no fight left in me. I just told him that I was ready to move on. But I did tell Melissa the truth—that I couldn’t take the badgering anymore, that the fun, good, inspiring parts of the job were no longer worth the ugly ones. She understood. I’m sure she’d heard the same explanation many times from many girls like me. Or maybe not. But I felt empowered by my choice, like it was the first truly grown-up decision I’d made in my life.

  When I left work on my final day, I thought I’d walk home from the gallery on East Seventy-Sixth Street to my apartment on Fourteenth Street. It would be good to clear my head. The next conscious thought I had after that occurred all the way down on Houston Street, nearly a half mile past Fourteenth Street. I kept going. I walked all the way through Tribeca, past the World Trade Center, to Battery Park, at the bottom of Manhattan. Then I turned around and headed all the way back uptown. I wasn’t ready to end the peaceful trance the walk had put me in. I ended up back at my parents’ apartment on East Sixty-Seventh Street. Yes, I walked nearly eleven miles that night, through the Manhattan streets in the dark, alone. When I arrived, my parents were out for the night, so I just crawled into bed and fell fast asleep.

  I don’t remember what was going through my head on that walk, just that it gave me a new beginning. I meditated on my freedom long enough to actually physically feel it. So many of the transitional moments in my life have seemed surreal—too foreign to take in at first. My long walk that night—the stress of the job off my shoulders and the opportunity to start again—gave me the chance to absorb it all and wake up the next morning in a new world.

  A collage of three photos that Christopher took of me sleeping under a Cindy Sherman piece in Larry Gagosian’s East Hampton guest room, 1997.

  In 2000, Christopher and I were on a Vogue shoot in Montauk. The photographer Arthur Elgort whispered to me that he could tell by our body language that we were going to get married. He took portraits of us and gave them to me as a present when we got engaged months later.

  HOW COMMITMENT TO THE MAN OF MY DREAMS SET ME FREE TO BE A FASHION CHAMELEON

  IF YOU REALLY WANT to see me light up, you should ask me how I met my husband. It’s my favorite question to be asked at a dinner party, and the subsequent conversation, whether it’s about the beginning of my relationship or the other person’s, always leads somewhere sincere and engaging. In this case, you can’t ask me how I met Christopher, but I’m going to tell you anyway, because my marriage to him ultimately provided the solid foundation on which I was able to experiment with careers, personas, lifestyles, friends, and of course fashion.

  At age twenty-two I was still in my first year of real life in New York City. Ten months out of college, I lived with my parents on the Upper East Side, worked at Gagosian, went out every night, and somehow managed to wake up early enough to Rollerblade twice around the big loop in Central Park every morning. I had made a new best friend at Gagosian. Her name was Tara, and she was truly beautiful—like a cross between Audrey Hepburn and Julia Roberts, with wide doe eyes and a beaming, toothy smile. Most nights after work Tara and I used the money we’d saved from buying a cheap lunch (chicken Caesar salad from the corner deli) to go across the street to Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle and have a glass of Sancerre and a bowl of warm nuts, which often substituted for our dinner, before heading off to a gallery opening and then some party downtown that one of our young art-world buddies knew about.

  After a few months of doing the “gallerina” social circuit, Tara and I started receiving the occasional last-minute invite from Nadine Johnson, the high-powered publicist in charge of not only Gagosian’s best parties but the parties for nearly all the rest of the art and fashion worlds, too. The invites would come at about five P.M., through the fax machine, on the day of. We knew we were only invited when Nadine realized last minute that she needed a few more PYTs at a given party, but we didn’t care, we were just thrilled to go. The best last-minute invite we got was for a Versace party in Harlem. They were taking over the once famous Cotton Club to celebrate a new perfume or handbag (I don’t remember which), and Donatella herself was the host. Tara and I met up for drinks with Lucy Sykes, a fashion friend from my Demarchelier days (Lucy was Paul Cavaco’s assistant at Bazaar while I was Patrick’s), and we all headed up to Harlem together, wearing our best outfits and our highest heels. I wore my trusty black Joseph pleather pants with a red ostrich feather chubby and vintage red YSL sandals, the latter both from the flea market.

  The Cotton Club was packed when we got there, and we pushed our way to the bar to get vodka tonics with two limes. Seeing that the upstairs was less crowded, Lucy and I headed up there, having lost Tara to another friend at the bar. At the top of the second-floor landing, a handsome guy with closely cropped hair and a bleached-out jean jacket caught my eye.

  “Who’s that?” I asked Lucy.

  “That’s Looks Brooks!” she responded enthusiastically.

  “What?!?” I replied, thinking I’d misheard her over the crowd and the pounding music.

  “LOOKS. BROOKS,” Lucy repeated. “His name is Christopher, but everyone back home calls him Looks because he was famous in the eighties for being the best-looking man in England.”

  Christopher in all his Looks Brooks glory in Ibiza, 1984.

  I gave Lucy a slightly dubious look, not because he wasn’t handsome but because it just seemed like a ridiculous nickname.

  “Come, I’ll introduce you,” she insisted before I had the chance to comment.

  But Christopher was engaged in a conversation with someone else, so we stood right behind him pretending to be having our own conversation but really just waiting for him to be free to chat.

  “He is hot,” I mouthed to Lucy behind Christopher’s back.

  A little tipsy from downing our drinks, Lucy then licked her right index finger and made a sssssssssizzling sound while gently touching her finger to his back, making sure he didn’t notice. We cracked up.

  At the sound of
our shrieking, juvenile laughter, Christopher turned around, all calm and sincere and straightforward. He said hi to Lucy and then introduced himself to me. His English accent and his shy smile got to me, even more than his high cheekbones and deep green eyes.

  That was it for that night. Not finding much more to say, Lucy and I wandered off to find Tara.

  Christopher would later tell me that the Versace party wasn’t the first place he’d seen me. He’d spotted me at a Valentine’s Day party at the house of a guy I’d been dating, and Christopher had asked a friend who I was, thinking I was cute. The friend explained that I was dating the host of the party, and that was that.

  So a couple of weeks after the Versace shindig, Tara and I were at the afterparty for Juan Uslé’s opening at the Robert Miller Gallery. We were with a guy and a girl who decided to dance with each other, and so Tara beckoned me out onto the dance floor by promising she would teach me to salsa dance. We were at it for hours, laughing as I tried to keep time with her. A couple of drinks into it we found our rhythm and started to look like we kind of knew what we were doing. As we made our way back to the bar on a dance break, I caught Christopher’s eye. We waved and smiled at each other but didn’t speak that night.

  The next day, at Gagosian, the intercom interrupted whatever work I was doing. “Amanda, Christopher Brooks on line one.”