Being Rachel Zoe
“It was pouring rain in Paris in early July, and Rachel Zoe was late for the 11:30 a.m. Chanel haute couture presentation. “Oh, I shouldn’t say who my favorite is,” Zoe told me the day before the show. “So many of the designers are my friends. They all want to get their clothes on my clients.” Still, for Zoe, a Hollywood stylist who has dressed stars like Lindsay Lohan, Cameron Diaz and Keira Knightley, Chanel’s red-carpet ball gowns would have been a top priority of the couture calendar. And yet there she was, stuck in traffic in her chauffeured Mercedes sedan, an hour away from the Chanel show, which was to be held at a former palace in St.-Cloud, a suburb of Paris.
As always, Zoe (pronounced ZOH) was dressed for the designer she was viewing. She was wearing a bright pink nubby wool Chanel jacket, black pants and her usual five-inch platform open-toed shoes. All the Zoe trademarks were in place: she was very tan; her long blond hair was carefully styled to look carefree; there were ropes of gold chains around her neck and stacks of diamond bangles on her wrists; and enormous (Chanel) sunglasses nearly obscured her face. 
Even wearing high heels, she is short and stick-thin, but Zoe, who is 36, does not seem fragile. The masses of jewelry, the outsize sunglasses, the whole noisy, ’70s-inspired look add up to a hectic, ostentatious, theatrical sort of glamour.
It’s the look she has duplicated on her clients, making the so-called Zoe-bots paparazzi favorites, as well as walking advertisements for a host of top designers. A cross-pollinator of the worlds of Hollywood celebrities, high fashion and tabloid magazines, Zoe has become a powerful image broker, a conduit to the ever-more lucrative intersection of commerce, style and fame. Early in her career, in 1996, she worked as a stylist at YM magazine, dressing such teenage pop stars as Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson, girls who were young enough to be molded and popular enough to be influential.
Around the same time, magazines like Us Weekly began inventing their own cadre of celebrities, like Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. They had no discernible accomplishments or talent, but they did seem to go out a lot, and they thrived under the flash of the paparazzi. Magazines like Us constructed provocative narratives around them — their romantic woes, their drug problems — and Zoe, who began working with Richie in 2003 when she was viewed only as Hilton’s plump sidekick, saw an opportunity. “Nicole is now what people refer to as the big thing that happened,” Zoe told me in Paris. “Everything went from nowhere to everywhere. Nicole was about creating a look. Because of her fashion sense, which was really my fashion sense, she became famous. It was a huge moment: Nicole became a style icon without being a star.”
Please read it all at Lynn Hirschberg’s BEING RACHEL ZOE at NY Times
Actually, I really like this site and the nickname the owner has given Rachel….
Also cool – Sunday Times Online “Fashion’s No1 stylist, or just a great big zero?”
