This is an edited excerpt of my conversation with world-renowned Real Housewives expert Dame Brian Moylan for the Back Row podcast. You can watch or listen to the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. Follow the show so you don’t miss a single episode. If you like the pod, please leave a rating and a review, which takes ten seconds and really helps other people find the show.
The Real Housewives franchise has long been a conduit for self-promotion. For some cast members, they just want to juice an Instagram following. Others join with the aim of exploiting business interests. Fans accept this, so long as drama transpires. After all, shameless self-promotion is a fact of life now for many of us, like taxes and overactive group chats.
But what motivated Rachel Zoe, one of the most successful red-carpet stylists of all time, to return to Bravo after her own reality show, The Rachel Zoe Project, ended in 2013? She’s two episodes in to her run as a new cast member of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and she’s shaping up to be “a perfect Real Housewife,” as acclaimed Housewives expert, New York Times bestselling author of Housewives, and veteran Vulture recapper Brian Moylan told me on the Back Row podcast. Zoe talks in the show about how her business, which begat a clothing line on The Rachel Zoe Project, now encompasses 40 licensed brand extensions, apparently ranging from fragrance sold at Walmart to a rug collaboration she was recently plugging on Instagram. However, it’s not clear that she’s on the show primarily to promote her brand(s). Could her motivations be… more personal than that? She suggested as much to People, stating that she is “not doing the show for the money.”
Last year, news broke of her split from her husband Rodger Berman, who had been by her side as a life and business partner for much of Zoe’s public life. If he always rubbed you the wrong way (raises hand), Zoe now suggests there were reasons! Real and serious marriage-shattering reasons. With that relationship behind her, she says on the show that all she really wants is a hot girl summer. Don’t we all? Doesn’t she deserve
I’ve been a fan of Zoe’s for a long time, having interviewed her regularly over the years, and (obviously) fully take her side in the divorce, as does my friend Dame Brian. We want her to have the hot girl summer of her dreams, too. Ahead, we chat about Zoe’s entree to Housewives, the Housewives’ undeniable impact on the fashion industry, and more.
We have a major fashion star becoming a Real Housewife yet again. How did this happen?
At Bravocon, [Rachel] said that they had been calling her every year to ask her to be on, and she finally said yes. However, Andy Cohen said Rachel called and was like, “I want to be on.” She had her own reality show called The Rachel Zoe Project [that began] in 2008.
I could see how producers would be like, “Rachel, are you interested?” “Are you interested?” But then after enough nos, they probably stopped calling. I feel like they probably called her a bunch of times, but then this time she was like, “I want in.”
It seems like the reason she wanted in is because she wants to set the record straight about her marriage.
Well, fans are taking it even a step further and saying she wanted to be on the show to trash talk her ex-husband. When I talked to a producer of international versions of The Real Housewives for my book, he said that what they would always do is figure out why a woman wanted to be on the show, and that was her storyline.
We chatted previously about Jenna Lyons joining The Real Housewives of New York, which was such an important moment for the Housewives, but also for fashion. Like Rachel Zoe, Jenna has real fashion bonafides. She dressed Michelle Obama when she was First Lady. She ran J. Crew to great acclaim. She was a street style star. Rachel Zoe has similar bonafides. She was the original celebrity stylist. People forget that in the nineties, styling wasn’t really a thing. Then Rachel Zoe comes along in the aughts and makes it this profession that can make you famous.
I have a friend who says Rachel Zoe invented vocal fry. And I don’t know if that’s true, but it feels true.
I do think that there is a difference between Rachel and Jenna. Jenna went on very obviously to promote her business. She had a line of fake lashes that I think is now discontinued, but she wanted to promote that and make some money.
It’s discontinued?
If it’s not discontinued, it’s “sold out everywhere.”
I think Jenna always chafed at how much of her [personal] life to share. The difference for Rachel is she also has those fashion bonafides, but we know from her first reality show that she’s willing to show it all.
It shows the power that reality television has now over the fashion industry. I remember in the early seasons of Real Housewives of New York, they’d go to these fashion shows and they’d be, like, third-tier designers you never heard of because those are the only people who’d let them in. And now you have Lisa Rinna on the cover of CR Fashion Book, entering the fashion elite. I think that Rachel is just solidifying how far reality television has come in the estimation of the mainstream fashion establishment.
Rebecca Minkoff then joined the New York cast alongside Jenna Lyons. I wrote in Back Row, “It struck me that a seismic shift may be be afoot on Planet Housewives. It was once a launching pad for Housewives like Bethenny Frankel and Housewives nepo-babies like the Hadid sisters. But has it become a landing pad for fashion people in particular?” And I want to revisit this question. Do you think that it’s now a landing pad instead of a launching pad?
Absolutely. I wrote a story for Inc. magazine where I talked to Rebecca Minkoff about her experience as a business person on the show. And she told me that when an episode would air, the web traffic would go through the roof and that Housewives fans were going to the website buying at a higher price point. They weren’t waiting for the sale. And she was 15, 20 years into her brand by the time she got into Housewives. She told me that they did some research and her brand recognition was up 200% from a decade before just by being on The Housewives.
So the exes of the Beverly Hills Housewives apparently are always photographed kissing women on sidewalks in L.A. Particularly Mauricio “Mo” Umansky, who has a Chanel couch?
I think it was a Chanel blanket on the couch. One of the cushions had the interlocking C logo, and I was like, is that a Chanel couch? So I had to get real up close and forensic.
Thank you for your investigative journalism.
If it was an actual Chanel couch, the recap was about to go off on Mauricio and his Chanel couch.
To your point about how the fashion is a character on this show, you talk in your recaps about the Birkin and Kelly bags that are just everywhere and gaping open. You wrote: “On this episode of our favorite show, Rich Women Doing Things, the rich women did things! They compared their identical Birkins, each with a price tag, and we all wondered what exactly made one worth $32,000, one worth $30,000, and one worth $14,000, and why all of them were unclasped and hanging open like chastity belts on a wedding day.”
I’m not a bag expert, but it was funny that they all show up to the scene and none of them do their Birkins up. I don’t know what’s going to tumble out of them, their secrets? But I’m terrified. Then they showed on screen how much each of them was worth. And poor Amanda, the new girl — hers was only worth $14,000
And none of them ever seem to be carrying black or brown. Their bags are like Skittles. I can’t tell if that’s their taste or if that’s what Hermès deigned to sell to them. You know that’s how they operate, right? A sales associate will call you and be like, “We have your Birkin” but it might be a big red bag you don’t want.
It’s like, “We’re not going to give you beige — that’s too classy, but we’ll give you this yellow one that no one wants.” If I was in the market for a Birkin, I would buy one of those secondhand that are still like $15,000, but then at least you can go and pick, like, “I like this color.”
Unclasped — is that a thing, though? Are these women just careless?
Earlier in Back Row
That makes me think of — and this is obviously not what these women are — but the one Olsen who is always going around with her beat-up Birkin. So is this their way of being like, “I use my bag,” versus it being a showpiece?
It felt to me like how, when we were in high school or middle school, you’d only have your backpack on one shoulder. Like, that’s the cool way to carry it.
Going back to Rachel: When she first appears, she talks about her split from Rodger. Do you remember when that broke? That was shocking.
Absolutely. Because they were together [33] years. I think that there are those reality TV couples that fight a lot, but they’re not going anywhere. And they seemed like one of those. He was so enmeshed in her business.
It seemed like he was running the business.
But in one of her scenes, she talks about how that was part of the problem — she saw him running the business and made decisions that she didn’t like.
She said, “He’s always been Grateful Dead, and I’ve always been St. Barth’s.”
That sounds about right, but I also feel like Rachel always had a little bit of Grateful Dead in her that she wanted to paper over to look more fashion. But it also always seemed like Rachel was more willing to go to a Grateful Dead concert than Rodger was ever willing to go to St. Barth’s.
You wrote in your recap that he never had a good haircut.
Never. Not once.
I agree. He also always had lots of jewelry. I seem to remember lots of leather bands around his wrists.
I’m seeing in my mind — and I don’t know if this is because Rodger wore it or just because it was the era — but knit beanies, Von Dutch caps. It’s like he only shopped at Kitson.
She talks about how he was stressed out about their business on that show. She describes it as kind of a toxic undercurrent of their relationship, which was really interesting.
And in a scene in the first episode where she’s talking to a producer, she says Rodger has had the same girl for a year. Then we see a Daily Mail headline about how he “cuddles mystery woman four months after split.” And Rachel says the kids have known probably for ten months, and then a producer asks if that means he had a girlfriend right after they split. And she’s like, “I’ll let you do the math.” Is the implication that he cheated?
I think she’s implying that if he didn’t have someone waiting in the wings, he was very quick to pick someone up. She doesn’t give a reason — at least that we’ve heard yet — for the divorce. She talks vaguely about miscommunication, we grew apart. He was this, I was that, whatever. But she doesn’t say, “This is what happened, and we got divorced.”
There’s a moment at the end of episode one where they’re at Kyle Richards’s Summer Solstice party, and they’re talking about their ex-husbands and these women that they’re always canoodling with on sidewalks, which is a disease among these men. And Rachel reveals in front of Kyle that she saw Mo in Aspen and someone tried to set her up with him. What do you make of that?
This is why she’s so great for the show. They are very obviously running in a social circle of people of a certain age and a certain financial caliber where they have houses in Beverly Hills, in Aspen and whatever. I think there’s not many people in this world, but everyone’s like, “You just got divorced. Mauricio just getting divorced. You two should date.” But what I love about this is Rachel knew to bring it up. She knew it would be juicy and great for reality television. And she also knew to immediately be like, “And I was like, no.” So she’s showing herself as a girl’s girl. She has Kyle’s back
She says in the second episode, she’s always afraid of pissing people off. But we did not see any of that when she showed up at that party. And that is going to make for a perfect Real Housewife.
Hear more from my chat with Brian Moylan — including more of our discussion of the husbands’ sidewalk kissing epidemic, Mo’s disturbing Chanel couch accessory, and more — on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.
