The Return of Rachel Zoe

And now onto today’s big story…

The Real Housewives franchise isn’t the ace in the hole it once was. The New York iteration is on hiatus, the most recent Beverly Hills season seems to have been met with a shrug by fans (so I hear, I did not watch), and the series faces steep competition from newer mega-hits in the reality genre, like The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and Love Island. If the national treasure that is the Real Housewives is to survive and thrive, Bravo needs to make some bold moves to, at the least, bring back old Millennials who once regularly enjoyed wine o’clock to the dulcet tones of overly accessorized women bickering, but now spend their nights caring for children, tending the home, and drinking THC seltzer to numb the generalized sense of dread that comes with living in America in 2025.

Well, Bravo is reeling us (me) back in: Rachel Zoe announced Friday that she’s joining the cast of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Zoe hasn’t been on Bravo since her reality show The Rachel Zoe Project ended in 2013, making her, frankly, overdue for our televisions.

In casting Zoe, Bravo’s effort to plant fashion women on these shows goes bicoastal. The New York franchise experienced a short-lived renaissance when former J. Crew creative director Jenna Lyons joined the program and everyone fell in love with her style and apartment and general vibe. She always looked incredible, delivered memorable quotes (e.g. Christmas lights are “like sequins for trees”), and had a way of praising her cast mates and shading them at the same time. Like when they went to the Hamptons for a girls’ weekend and content creator Sai packed, like, eight bags and Jenna just wore her uniform of jeans, a sweater, and sparkly jewelry for the entire weekend. Or when she told the women to wear khaki, black, and metallic to a fondue party at her apartment and they had no idea what to pick, leaving Jenna to lament, “Khaki is a color, it’s not khakis.”

Jenna Lyons’s popularity surely helped explain the following season’s casting of designer Rebecca Minkoff, who was less successful as a cast member. It is into Jenna Lyons’s shoes that Zoe must step! Zoe enters the Beverly Hills franchise as a fashion veteran who — like Lyons — has had actual influence in her field. Lyons, for instance, made clothing for one of the most famous women on the planet, Michelle Obama, many years before she landed on Bravo. Zoe not only essentially architected the job of “celebrity stylist” as the public understands it today, but also created the red carpet and “off-duty” looks associated with so many stars in the aughts. After styling for YM magazine and dressing the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears, she found her footing as the go-to red carpet stylist for actresses during a time when movies really mattered. She famously dressed Jennifer Garner for the 2006 Oscars in a one-shoulder vintage orange Valentino dress that, Zoe told Back Row, “really was a game-changer for both of us.” She went on to style Mischa Barton, Anne Hathaway, Lindsay Lohan, Kate Hudson, and Nicole Richie, to name a handful — all women I’m guessing the Housewives would give up their Chanel logo earrings to sit next to at a daytime weekday fundraiser.

Zoe wasn’t solely responsible for bringing the entertainment and fashion industries closer together, but she was an influential force, particularly when it came to expanding the public’s idea of fashion. She would warn her clients when a look was too high-fashion to be palatable to the masses, but many of them wore those pieces anyway.

“It was a really rare moment that the mainstream press and the fashion press would love the same look equally,” she told me. “It happened a few times, like with Eva Mendes or Keira Knightly, Jen Garner a few times, Cameron [Diaz]. But a lot of the times, my favorites were not the most adored by the tabs.” Now, fashion is much more accessible thanks to the internet, and the rules around red carpet dressing are much looser. Alexander Skarsgård can show up to Cannes in thigh-high boots and it’s a moment but also, business as usual.

By hanging out with the most famous women of the aughts, Zoe became a tabloid fixture herself. The “boho chic” look we associate with stars like Nicole Richie stemmed from Zoe, who loved caftans and vintage and jewelry and walking around with a gigantic Starbucks cup. Tabloids called stars that emulated her look “Zoe-bots,” which she told People made her “mental.”

“There was so much paparazzi [chronicling] my clients’ every move. If they were walking out of the Chateau Marmont, a Coffee Bean, The Ivy. They were chasing them down Robertson. And I think one or all of them would mention, ‘Oh, I stopped by Rachel's house,’ you know. And then the press came after me,” she said.

She was famous enough to become a target of wild gossip herself, such as, she recalled, “[t]hat I was dealing, like, horse pills or something.” Though she remembered being crushed by those false rumors, the intrigue led Bravo to give her a reality show, The Rachel Zoe Project. Premiering in 2008, it documented her styling business and made stars of her on-air assistants like Taylor Jacobson, Brad Goreski, and Jeremiah Brent in the process.

Thanks to that show, Zoe became as known for her style as much as her vernacular — “I die” “Bananas” “Major” “She shut it down.” I believe the way Zoe talked on this show shaped how people talk about fashion on the internet in general. (“Slay.” “Deceased.” “Killing it.” Or whatever the talking heads say. One word or two is generally enough for the internet to either get behind a look or come at it with pitchforks.)

I encounter people who work in fashion regularly who watched Zoe’s show religiously, and say it was the inspiration for them to get into the business. Law Roach, probably the most famous celebrity stylist working today, regularly cites Zoe as his inspiration. “The Rachel Zoe Project was my peek into the industry. Not saying I wanted to be her, but she had all these clients; she knew all the designers and she went to the shows in Paris. If I had to say that I wanted to model my career as anyone, it would’ve been her,” he said in a CFDA.com interview.

The show lasted five years, and Zoe said in that People interview that fans ask her all the time about bringing it back. “And yet, at the same time, the only thing I could say is that the very accidental horror, of terrible, dramatic assistants and stuff, that would never occur in my life now. If that's what people want, then no, I can't.”

Since the show ended, Zoe has left the celebrity styling game. She started The Zoe Report newsletter (which was acquired by Bustle Digital Group in 2019), launched the podcast Climbing in Heels, and separated from her husband of 26 years, Rodger Berman, who was also her business partner. She also started a subscription box business called Curateur. And she’s been a woman about Beverly Hills, appearing at Baby2Baby luncheons and so forth wearing big sunglasses and even bigger necklaces.

The Housewives gives her an opportunity to promote Curateur and I’m guessing we’ll hear a lot about it, the way we heard a lot about Lyons’s line of false eyelashes. As my friend and Housewives scholar Brian Moylan said in a recent Back Row interview, people like Lyons and probably Zoe, too, have a leg up in negotiations with Bravo: “They need Jenna Lyons more than Jenna Lyons needs the show, because she lends it an air of sophistication and legitimacy. Like, Oh, if Jenna's doing it, then why shouldn't I do it?”

One salient critique of Lyons on the show was that she seemed more intent on preserving her public image than participating in drama, and that her eschewing said drama made her a lackluster cast member. I loved watching her anyway, but Zoe could take a similar tact, particularly since she sounds a bit scarred by The Rachel Zoe Project (Brent is the only assistant she remains in contact with). I’ve interviewed and chatted with her off-the-record a number of times over the last decade and a half, and she goes out of her way to be nice. Her power on the show may be that fashion people have a way of unsettling the dynamic with these women. Lyons intimidated them with restraint and sophistication. Zoe is not going to shame them by wearing a subdued gray sweater when everyone else is wearing head-to-toe resort runway looks from Gucci and Ulla Johnson, but I do hope she shares her thoughts on their clothes.

Personally, I’m very much looking forward to this. I found The Rachel Zoe Project addictive. I liked peering into her world, and whatever little glimpse of it we get on her podcast videos is not enough.