To hear her tell it, Rachel Zoe never meant for all this to happen.
“Accidentally famous,” she said last week in her hotel room at the Mercer hotel in New York. “Truthfully.”
And yet there she was, surrounded by all the trappings of fame: swathed in a white cotton robe, basking in the glow of a ring light while a makeup artist applied dabs of foundation to her face, which was framed by tousled waves of honey-colored hair, and surrounded by racks of dresses and fur coats with vertiginous black heels neatly lined up underneath. All this in preparation for her to attend the Michael Kors fashion show that afternoon at Lincoln Center.
“I was a behind-the-scenes person my whole life,” she said. “I became a stylist so that I could be behind the scenes. I’m the person who got offered the lead in a play and then asked for a supporting role.”
“Or,” she added, “like, the tree in the back.”
But Ms. Zoe did, in fact, become famous. She is known, arguably, as the first celebrity stylist — not the first person to style celebrities, but as a stylist whose own profile matched (and, at times, eclipsed) that of the starlets she dressed. She cemented this reputation with her reality TV show “The Rachel Zoe Project,” which ran on the Bravo network starting in 2008. On it, she sat front-row at fashion shows, air-kissed household-name designers, called in frocks from luxury brands for her A-list clients to wear to high-profile events and shopped.
Boy, did she ever shop. (An unofficial tagline on the show was “I die,” a common response to seeing a particularly fetching item while browsing a designer store.)
Today, if you know who Law Roach is, that Jennifer Lawrence often wears the Row on her downtime or what red carpet method dressing is, you have Ms. Zoe to thank (or blame).
Ms. Zoe ended her own show in 2013, after the birth of her first son. She took time to focus on being a mother, tend to her now-defunct ready-to-wear collection and build a brand around her name that today licenses some 40 products, from pajamas to pillows to bedsheets, sold on Amazon and at Bloomingdale’s and Wal-Mart.
Last summer, it was announced that Ms. Zoe would be returning to television as a cast member on “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” the long-running series that follows the friendships and infighting of a group of affluent women in Los Angeles.
It was a homecoming, but it was not without its risks. While she was an executive producer on “The Rachel Zoe Project,” she is now merely a cast member, her reputation in the hands of Bravo executives. While her own show focused on the workaday dramas of dressing Tinseltown’s elite, the “Housewives” franchise is fueled by petty personal grievances aired out among its coterie of pampered players. And, crucially, Ms. Zoe signed on to the show just as her longtime marriage to Rodger Berman, an investment banker and her business partner, was ending.
“My life is a lot right now,” she said with a sigh as the makeup artist brushed bronzer on her legs. “But going back to the Bravo audience felt so right.”
She recalled meeting with the Bravo executive and “Housewives” consigliere Andy Cohen: “Andy was like, ‘Remember how you were an executive producer on your show? You’re not on this, and you won’t see it until it airs, and there’s nothing I can do about it.’”
“Well, what I can control,” she said, “is myself.”
Ms. Zoe has been able to use her turn on “Housewives” to exhibit new sides of herself: that of a businesswoman, a mother of two boys — Skyler and Kaius — and a woman navigating singledom after 26 years of marriage. Her reality TV reflexes kick in as she plays the delicate dance of revealing just enough, as in scenes when she discovers that her sons have met their father’s girlfriend, or her divorce news hits the media.
“My purpose, a big part of it, is to really share a lot of what I’m going through, candidly,” she said. “And, listen, there’s a lot I don’t share, just because he’s the father of my children.”
Halfway through her debut season, fans are enjoying her gauzy, boho-chic clothes, oversize sunglasses and clanking layers of gold jewelry mixed with a daffy, arch mien. She is less a chaos agent and more a dumbstruck avatar for the audience. Take her stunned expression when a castmate asks if a coffee shop’s matcha tea is “ceremonial grade” and if the barista can make it with half almond milk, half oat milk.
Her deadpan response: “Live on the edge and do almond.”
Mr. Cohen listed the reasons he thought she would work in the show, saying, “She’s fun to watch, she’s aspirational and she’s opinionated.”
Kathy Hilton, who entered the show a few years back to much fanfare, has known Ms. Zoe for years. “Rachel is a girl’s girl,” she said. “She’s always fun. She’s upbeat. She’s going to tell you the truth, and she walks the walk.”
“And, boy, does she have an eye,” she added. “She really understands how fashion can change the energy in a room.”
Born Rachel Zoe Rosenzweig and raised in Short Hills, N.J., Ms. Zoe has been entranced by fashion from a young age. She recalls going to a friend’s house at 8 years old and picking out his school outfits, one for each day of the week, and saving up her allowance money to buy a Louis Vuitton purse while on family vacation. (She still has it.)
After college, she worked as a fashion editor at YM magazine and styled bands for music videos. When she began working with actresses, her first celebrity client was Jennifer Garner. Later, she was associated with tabloid princesses like Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie.
It was with them that she intuited the power of dressing clients beyond their highly controlled, Hollywood-orchestrated press appearances. “I felt like style should be something that you have in all aspects of your life,” she said.
Ms. Zoe gave her clients Chloé Paddington or Fendi Spy bags for slinging over their shoulders for runs to Coffee Bean, for entering and exiting clubs of the era, like Hyde or Les Deux, or for trips to the trendy Kitson boutique. “I’d be with Lindsay or Nicole in fittings, and they were like, ‘Well, I’m going to dinner, I’m going to wherever,’ and I was like, ‘You’re going to get papped,’” she said. “So it just became part of it.”
She continued: “I would hear some stylists say, ‘Well, they hired me for two looks, so that’s it.’ I dressed them for whatever they needed. It became this thing for me where I’m like, ‘I’m styling you for your life because everything’s being documented.’”
In that, she was ahead of the curve.
She also took what she learned from the makeup artists and hairstylists she worked with and built herself into a brand.
“Well, here’s the thing,” she said in her hotel room, picking out rings and necklaces from a table, her hands gravitating toward the gold baubles with barely a glance. “Everything’s a business now. You can’t just be one thing anymore. It’s like how a hairstylist now has a product line. They also do extensions. It’s the same with stylists. It’s sort of like, OK, if I only do this, I have nothing tangible to sell, to own, to have equity in. What if I can’t style anymore? What if that whole business goes away? What am I left with?”
Ms. Zoe no longer styles — well, she takes on a friend here or there, she said — but she has a podcast, is editor-at-large at The Zoe Report, a fashion website she sold to Bustle Digital Group in 2018 and has her line of products.
Back in her hotel room, Ms. Zoe changed into a bronze skirt and matching blouse, topped with a chocolate-brown fur coat and sunglasses. She was ready to go.
Shortly after, in an SUV cruising north along the West Side Highway, she reflected on her life and how styling had provided so many opportunities, far beyond what she could have dreamed of in Short Hills, just across the river.
“It’s not until I do an interview that I remember everything, like being in Prague with Brad Pitt for two weeks and styling eight covers for V Magazine with him,” she said. “Or shooting with Steven Klein or Mario Testino, shooting a commercial with Wong Kar-wai.”
“It’s wild,” she said. “But, then, my whole life has been wild.”
The door to the SUV opened, and a few bulbs flashed. Ms. Zoe struck a pose for the cameras and strutted into the show.
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