What is a professional muse?

Well?

I think it would be a sort of prostitute, only the client gets arty inspiration instead of sex??

(to be honest Gale i have no idea :-/ electric sound of jim's joke was too clevah for me)

also i stayed up drinking with my friend R. until MUCH TOO LATE last night, and today have achieved nothing and am barely even fuzzy when it comes to logic...

I think you're probably OTM there (about the muse bit, not about the joke being to clever)

Momus

Okay, I think I can explain, at least in relation to fashion. A professional muse is someone like Isabella Blow, Katy England or Amanda Harlech who is generally from a very posh background and likes a bit of Bohemian. They start out being an assistant at Vogue or some kind of minor model or stylist and 'discover' a fashion designer. The 'muse' has style and contacts and the designer (usually a gay man) takes his inspiration from what she wears, what she says and does after the sixth bottle of champagne. As the designer gets famous, the 'muse' gets given a Creative Director job at his atelier and the consumer who stumbles upon interviews with the guy reads quotes from him saying that she has some otherworldly quality blah blah blah and glams up the mystery of being a wooooooman. It's important - initially at least - that the woman in question does not appear to work for a living, has some kind of tragic/melancholy mien about her, Evokes A Bygone Era and doesn't seem so bright. The joke is that the three women I mentioned at the start now have BIG fashion jobs and are probably working harder than they believed they would EVER have to (and learnt a few things into the bargain).

If the man looking for a muse is straight, she will be the first woman he describes to his long-suffering girlfriend as 'mad'. Within three months the LSG will have been left by the man for the madwoman, and hilarity ensues.

Art: see Picasso, Warhol.

Music: see Paul McCartney; *not* John Lennon - the muse is not a mommy substitute.

I've always thought the whole construct was vaguely sexist, relying on a certain passivity in the women in question, the way it's written about in Edgy Fashion Magazines; however *women* can have muses too. But they don't usually sit on their arse all day eating grapes, talking about the horrors of being a debutante.

Thanks Suzy . I understand it now. Sounds better than some other posts. I just thought that a muse just might be the inspiration for another person?