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If you haven’t yet been tempted to watch any of the Real Housewives shows, then this might just be the thing to lure you in. Last week it was revealed that none other than the original celebrity stylist, Rachel Zoe, would be joining the cast of the Beverly Hills iteration. Speaking about the news on Instagram, the 53-year-old said, “It’s been a while and you’ve been asking when I’ll come back to television, and I said it was a matter of when the stars align or it makes sense, or I have enough to say—and now is the time.”
In many ways, it’s a match made in heaven. After all, the Housewives are known for their OTT glamor—even if it’s not to everyone’s taste—and they’re omni-present at lunches, launches and other fashion-adjacent events. And the show has definitely been trying to make more inroads into the fashion world. In 2023, fellow 2000s cool girl, the former J. Crew designer Jenna Lyons, joined the cast of The Real Housewives of New York. The following year, designer Rebecca Minkoff also joined the cast, but quit after one season.
Now, the producers are clearly hoping that the Beverly Hills version will benefit from a little of Zoe’s undeniable charisma. After all, it’s what made her a celebrity in the first place.
For anyone unfamiliar, Zoe walked so super stylists like Law Roach could run, and is credited with practically inventing the celebrity styling profession back in the mid 2000s. With a role call of famous clients including It-girls of the era Misha Barton, Nicole Richie and Lindsay Lohan, Zoe was the first stylist who became a celebrity in her own right, with her girls even dubbed “Zoebots” in the press. She became best-known for popularizing her signature boho-chic style, favoring floaty printed dresses, coin belts and layers of necklaces—a look that was mimicked endlessly.
Of course, Zoe’s rise wasn’t without its controversy, and she was somewhat unfairly blamed with making the size zero look popular after a number of her clients became worryingly skinny. “They say I’m starving people,” Zoe told WWD in 2009. “Not one of my clients is a size zero. Not one. They say that all of my clients look the same. Are you going to tell me that Jennifer Garner is dressed like Cameron Diaz and Liv Tyler looks like Kate Hudson? It doesn’t make any sense. You want to crawl up into a ball, you want to hide, you want to quit your job, you want to disappear. I’ve developed a bit of a thicker skin, but I’m not going to say it doesn’t hurt, because it does.”
Luckily, she didn’t hide. In fact, with her popularity and notoriety going from strength to strength, she was given her own Bravo series, The Rachel Zoe Project, which ran until 2013. Exploring her career as a mega-stylist, it featured plenty of glamour and drama—something of a Housewives signature. Much of the tension came from Zoe’s relationships with her assistants, each of whom has gone on to become a household name today: Brad Goreski, Taylor Jacobson and Jeremiah Brent. But what really made it television gold was that Zoe herself was so magnetic and unapologetically herself. She even spoke in a completely idiosyncratic way, popularizing now ubiquitous fashion parlance like “major” and “I die” (also adopted by the Kardashians et al).
Today, Zoe is no longer working as a celebrity stylist, so don’t expect to see scenes of her and Nicole Richie shopping. Instead, she now has her own newsletter The Zoe Report, and a podcast, Climbing In Heels, both of which have been very successful. She’s also recently launched Curateur, a subscription box, with the most recent Summer Box including signature oversize sunnies, vintage-look earrings and a mix of skincare and make-up. And she’s on the board of Baby2Baby, a non-profit that provides the essentials for babies living in poverty in America. Perhaps most interestingly for Bravo, she is very much still in those A-list circles that she once dressed, so the chance of a cameo from a famous face or two is there.
In many ways, fashion and reality TV don’t make sense as bedfellows. One takes itself very seriously, the other doesn’t. But for whatever reason, it just works—maybe it’s the big personalities associated with the fashion industry, or the relative frivolity of any drama. Plus of course, the fabulous clothes. Along with Zoe’s show, we’ve also had The Hills (which, as much as it was about dating, was also about Lauren Conrad’s internship at Teen Vogue) as well as The City (which followed Conrad’s ex-colleague Whitney Port as she went to work at Diane von Furstenberg in New York). And then of course there’s America’s Next Top Model, Project Runway—the list goes on.
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