Amber Rose Is Not Who You Think She Is

‘Like a moth to a flame’

Although she said she struggled with shyness when she first became famous, along with “a fear of being perceived,” Ms. Rose, by her account, grew up a confident, popular child in South Philadelphia. She described herself as proudly mixed-race. (Her mother is a Cape Verde Black woman, and her father is Irish-Italian.

She was mostly cared for by Dorothy her mother in her youth while Michael her father was in the military. She described their financial situation as “very poor” and said the family went through some tough periods, including a stint of homelessness. She fondly remembers living in noisy, exciting neighborhoods where neighbors would fry up fish, and people would D.J. You can also dance on the streets.

“I was always the first one dancing. I was a little ham,” she said.

She felt that she didn’t belong on the East Coast as a child and would often tell her friends she would be moving to Hollywood someday. By the time she was 18, she had moved instead to New York — specifically, the Bronx. She found work in strip clubs, such as Sue’s Rendezvous in Mount Vernon. Margo Wainwright (a music-video commissioner) who worked for Def Jam discovered her.

“When I started to talk to her about what I did and what was possible, I felt like she was open to it,” Ms. Wainwright said in a recent interview. “Even though people try to go in there and sell them dreams all the time.” Ms. Wainwright offered to help jump-start Ms. Rose’s career as a “video vixen” — women hired to appear in hip-hop videos. “There’s more to it than just being a pretty face,” Ms. Wainwright said. She had scouted other women who had “crumbled” in front of the camera but “it was totally the opposite of that with Amber. She really took to it, like a moth to a flame.”

Ms. Rose’s now iconic look — chunky black sunglasses, hair cropped short and immaculately dyed blonde — opened up her much-longed-for pathway to Hollywood. A video director, smitten with her trademark buzz-cut, offered to fly her to L.A. She wound up performing as one of the “main girls” in a video for the Ludacris song “What Them Girls Like” in 2008.

After her appearance, Mr. West called and asked her to perform in his video “Robocop” (which was never released — though a small clip leaked to the internet in 2014). She began to date Mr. West, and she signed with Ford Models. Her profile grew.