Libra Skye18
Active Member
- Joined
- May 2, 2005
- Messages
- 1,539
- Reaction score
- 2
How Rachel Zoe Became Hollywood's Most Powerful Fashion Player
From $18,000 a year to $10,000 per job: The new issue of The Hollywood Reporter details her extraordinary ascent from stylist to star to brand name.
Zoe’s house is all dark-wood floors and clean lines, its shuttered blinds cozy. Off the foyer, an assistant outfitted with full walkie-talkie regalia is circumnavigating a corner of baby shower gifts, which, like the nursery upstairs, are to be left untouched until said child — a boy — arrives. “We’re superstitious,” explains Berman, a former investment banker who met Zoe 19 years ago at a restaurant in Washington, D.C., where she worked as a hostess. “It’s a Jewish thing.”
Adds Rubenstein: “In the end, the public decides whose taste they want to emulate, not magazine editors or people sitting in the front rows. And the public has decided that they like Rachel.”
From $18,000 a year to $10,000 per job: The new issue of The Hollywood Reporter details her extraordinary ascent from stylist to star to brand name.
Five days after the curtain has dropped on the 83rd Academy Awards, the postshow congratulatory orchids are still arriving at Rachel Zoe’s home every few hours. The latest: a 4-footer from Giorgio Armani with a handwritten note thanking the celebrity stylist for showcasing the night’s “most spectacular red-carpet look … on stage.”
The revered designer is referring to Anne Hathaway’s off-the-shoulder cobalt-blue satin Armani Privé gown, No. 5 of eight total looks the actress wore on Oscar night (including a vintage Valentino on the red carpet, a stunning white, strapless Grecian Givenchy Haute Couture for the opening number and a metallic-beaded, flapper-style Oscar de la Renta that begged to be shimmied) all curated by Team Zoe, a seven-member army that tends to their 37-weeks-pregnant commanding officer’s every need.
Today, it’s a Coffee Bean run for iced tea, though Zoe’s third-trimester constant must-have is a liter of sparkling water, which she’ll down in an hour, straight from the bottle. With the extra pounds from her pregnancy, all contained in a tiny soccer ball-like shape that’s easily camouflaged, Zoe’s face is plump and full of color. She doesn’t glow; she radiates a sort of serenity you rarely see on her Bravo TV show, The Rachel Zoe Project, where she is constantly running ragged and under the gun of scheduled glamour.
The revered designer is referring to Anne Hathaway’s off-the-shoulder cobalt-blue satin Armani Privé gown, No. 5 of eight total looks the actress wore on Oscar night (including a vintage Valentino on the red carpet, a stunning white, strapless Grecian Givenchy Haute Couture for the opening number and a metallic-beaded, flapper-style Oscar de la Renta that begged to be shimmied) all curated by Team Zoe, a seven-member army that tends to their 37-weeks-pregnant commanding officer’s every need.
Today, it’s a Coffee Bean run for iced tea, though Zoe’s third-trimester constant must-have is a liter of sparkling water, which she’ll down in an hour, straight from the bottle. With the extra pounds from her pregnancy, all contained in a tiny soccer ball-like shape that’s easily camouflaged, Zoe’s face is plump and full of color. She doesn’t glow; she radiates a sort of serenity you rarely see on her Bravo TV show, The Rachel Zoe Project, where she is constantly running ragged and under the gun of scheduled glamour.
At 39, her ascent from stylist to star to brand name is nothing short of extraordinary. “I’m not sure that most people can name another stylist,” says Rodger Berman, her husband of 13 years and the president of Rachel Zoe Inc. since July.
Zoe’s success puts her in the company of such expert TV marketers as Donald Trump and Emeril Lagasse. Her knack for affordable elegance brought her Luxe Rachel Zoe outerwear and accessories line to QVC alongside launches by Kiehl’s, NARS Cosmetics and Dyson. Since its September 2009 launch, more than 260,000 units from the Luxe line (priced from $25-$325) have been ordered on QVC. “Its performance has far exceeded our expectations for the first year,” says Doug Howe, QVC’s executive vp strategic multichannel planning and merchandising. And her influence on fashion — from her brand ambassador position at Piperlime to the magazine spreads she styles to the red-carpet fashions she rolls out every awards season and the merch she moves for designers when she uses their clothes — brings to mind Zoe’s idol, Anna Wintour.
“When you’re a creative person, whether you design clothing or homes, your brain is constantly moving,” Zoe says. “What is beautiful? What gets you going? I have a 99 percent accuracy rate on my gut. I wish I could be that good with people. But projects, I’m pretty right-on about.”
Zoe’s house is all dark-wood floors and clean lines, its shuttered blinds cozy. Off the foyer, an assistant outfitted with full walkie-talkie regalia is circumnavigating a corner of baby shower gifts, which, like the nursery upstairs, are to be left untouched until said child — a boy — arrives. “We’re superstitious,” explains Berman, a former investment banker who met Zoe 19 years ago at a restaurant in Washington, D.C., where she worked as a hostess. “It’s a Jewish thing.”
Berman just wrapped a 45-minute weekly check-in call with one of nearly a dozen professional advisers (intellectual property attorneys, labor attorneys, corporate attorneys, transactional attorneys, business managers, agents, PR reps) now on retainer with RZI. The company also employs 14 full-time staffers who manage The Zoe Report, her daily digital newsletter with a readership of 250,000; the Rachel Zoe Collection, a contemporary line launching in the fall with licensing partner Li & Fung at such stores as Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman (prices range from $250-$700); The Rachel Zoe Project, her Bravo reality show that drew 1.1 million viewers to its Season 3 finale (up 31 percent from the previous year; the show is due to return in the fall); and her packed schedule. Listed on the calendar for today’s date: THR shoot; pregnancy full-term.
As the two pose together for a shot, it seems as opportune a moment as any for Zoe to announce the latter to her husband. “Mazel, honey! High five!” marvels the dad-to-be, meeting his wife’s hand halfway and borrowing a slogan made famous by Bravo executive vp Andy Cohen, a key figure in anointing Zoe and her husband to celebrity-couple status, however accidental. “I never wanted to be famous,” Zoe, who grew up in Short Hills, N.J., later declares.
“Rachel is an expert in her field, at the top of her game, and she’s addictive to watch,” Cohen says. He helped persuade Zoe to try television at a time when Project Runway, Top Chef and other trade-based reality shows had viewers buzzing. “The other star of The Rachel Zoe Project is the fashion,” he adds. “But as you go deeper into any reality show, more colors of the rainbow start to come out.” Like her slang, which includes the stupefied “I die” and the exultant “Ah-mazing.” Says Cohen, “The Zoe-isms are bananas.”
Despite finding success among the masses, she still has the respect of fashion elites. “Rachel Zoe has become a great, great star,” Vogue’s Andre Leon Talley says. “She’s as famous, if not more famous, than the people she dresses. I only wish I could have Rachel Zoe’s salary, her house and a TV show.”
Straddling both ends of the fashion spectrum is Zoe’s specialty. “No one wants to stay in the tabloids, but it’s actually not a terrible place to start,” she once said. Indeed, getting her start outfitting the likes of Nicole Richie and Lindsay Lohan not just for movie premieres and parties but also for their afternoon Starbucks runs handed Zoe an express pass to fashion VIP, where she was met with skepticism. But there’s no doubt tabloid culture had a direct impact on the public’s sense of style. Who can forget the oversized sunglasses every starlet wore circa 2005? Or the Nouveau Boho uniform of hobo bag, maxi dress and wedge platforms?
“The secret to Rachel’s success is the absolute clarity of her taste and her uncynical passion for fashion,” Harper’s Bazaar editor in chief Glenda Bailey says. “You can immediately identify a Rachel Zoe look — retro, glamorous, bohemian — but she still makes her clients look like individuals. It comes as no surprise that Rachel has her own brand, because her best advertisement is herself.”
Yards away on her table is a reminder of just how visible she is: a 6-inch-high stack of magazines — People, US Weekly, Life & Style and the like — marked up with colored stickies pointing to Zoe clients. In this line of work, validation still comes in column inches, though having been on the receiving end of her share of gossip items — scrutinizing everything from her weight (too little) to her fee (too much) — a simple credit properly identifying the designer can sometimes be enough. And on page after page, the results of her work are there, from virtually every red carpet, every week.
So does Zoe feel powerful? “No,” she says with an audible snort. “Oprah is power — she is everything. Martha, she can make a house out of a piece of paper. I have incredible respect for women like that because it’s not easy. People fight you every step of the way — they pull you down as soon as you get up. And the reality is, it’s harder for women. It’s like if a girl has fooled around with a lot of guys, she’s a sl*t. But if guys do it, they’re cool.”
With that in mind, Zoe has no qualms confessing that she is a “wh*re for fashion.” Her success is predicated on that most basic tenet, neither fame nor riches but passion. “I’ve never been driven by money; I’m driven by the path,” she says. “And fear. The scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life was start a collection. Being a designer was one of those things where I was, like, ‘Never, never, never!’ Leave it to my heroes. Then I started to itch for it. People would say to me, ‘You’re consulting with designers, giving people your creative, designing gowns … why not?’ ”
Zoe describes the look of her collection with almost a logical purpose. “My mission was to create wonderfully tailored, luxurious clothes — classic suits, tux jackets and faux fur — where they give off the feeling of luxury without having to pay for it,” she says.
With that in mind, Zoe has no qualms confessing that she is a “wh*re for fashion.” Her success is predicated on that most basic tenet, neither fame nor riches but passion. “I’ve never been driven by money; I’m driven by the path,” she says. “And fear. The scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life was start a collection. Being a designer was one of those things where I was, like, ‘Never, never, never!’ Leave it to my heroes. Then I started to itch for it. People would say to me, ‘You’re consulting with designers, giving people your creative, designing gowns … why not?’ ”
Zoe describes the look of her collection with almost a logical purpose. “My mission was to create wonderfully tailored, luxurious clothes — classic suits, tux jackets and faux fur — where they give off the feeling of luxury without having to pay for it,” she says.
“Retailers are buying it,” says InStyle fashion director Hal Rubenstein, who has known Zoe for eight years. “I think people were expecting to see Rachel open up her closet and have it spill out there, but the collection was not about her. She put together a line that she thought would sell.” Alan Chartash, chief strategy officer at Li & Fung, who is putting no fewer than 50 staffers (in marketing, sales, production and design) to work on the Rachel Zoe Collection, concurs. “Rachel is all about being original,” he says. “She knew exactly what she wanted from the beginning, and we were very much aligned with that.”
Adds Rubenstein: “In the end, the public decides whose taste they want to emulate, not magazine editors or people sitting in the front rows. And the public has decided that they like Rachel.”
So how did she get here, to the top of her trade and earning as much as $10,000 per job, according to one commercial client, while rubbing elbows with the likes of Tom Ford, Karl Lagerfeld and Marc Jacobs? Striking a pose in a vintage Halston gown and 5-inch Brian Atwood pumps as TV cameras document her every wobbly move? Presenting her own line to the highly critical fashion industry and then the world, where she stands to make as much as $20 million?
Like the Cinderella stories Zoe hopes to tell when she puts a movie star like Cameron Diaz in Chanel or when she gets free rein over the Valentino archives to find that perfect red-carpet look for Hathaway, hers has a lot to do with being in the right place at the right time. After her first job as a fashion assistant in New York at the now-defunct YM magazine (her salary: $18,000), Zoe went freelance at 25 and began styling for the likes of Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys from a one-bedroom West Village apartment. “I worked 20-something hours a day, seven days a week,” Zoe says. “I was completely obsessed with fashion and spent all my money flying to Paris to go to couture because that was the dream. I crashed shows, stood in line for Marc Jacobs. Designers were my heroes and my celebrities. It hasn’t really worn off.”
Zoe’s music-heavy résumé eventually led her to Jessica Simpson, whom she styled during her 2003-05 Newlyweds era. Zoe even made an appearance on the MTV reality series, foreshadowing her own future on television. (Worth noting: Simpson’s fashion line did $750 million in retail in 2010. “Everyone was saying whatever about Jessica and her Daisy Dukes,” Zoe snaps, “and Jessica is laughing all the way to the bank.”)
“A stylist is a behind-the-scenes job,” she says. “I’m never a star when I’m with a star — ever. Back then, I was very insecure about that. Even now, if you watch me on a red carpet, I’m physically uncomfortable. I can’t strike a good pose to save my life. Fortunately and unfortunately, it’s a part of brand-building. It’s just part of my job.”
When Zoe moved to Los Angeles in 2002, she did so with a clear purpose: “to merge the worlds of Hollywood and fashion. … Because I felt that there was this huge disconnect,” she says. “I didn’t understand why the most glamorous place in the world wasn’t using the most glamorous clothes.” She stops short of calling the L.A. fashion scene a joke but describes it as “very different. Ten years ago, you couldn’t find a fashion photographer or couture anywhere around here,” she says. “Coming out, I was fascinated by the red carpet and Old Hollywood in particular, so I was like, ‘You’ve gotta mix things up. You need to give some edge, some glamour, take some chances.’ ”
The first celebrity to gamble on Zoe was Jennifer Garner. A last-minute Emmy emergency precipitated the call, which Zoe answered with a custom Narciso Rodriguez dress. “It was so much work, and I was so nervous, but it was incredible making a woman feel that beautiful,” Zoe recalls. “Jen and I started this love affair after that.” Kate Hudson, Demi Moore, Diaz, Kate Beckinsale and Debra Messing followed, raising Zoe’s profile.
When Zoe moved to Los Angeles in 2002, she did so with a clear purpose: “to merge the worlds of Hollywood and fashion. … Because I felt that there was this huge disconnect,” she says. “I didn’t understand why the most glamorous place in the world wasn’t using the most glamorous clothes.” She stops short of calling the L.A. fashion scene a joke but describes it as “very different. Ten years ago, you couldn’t find a fashion photographer or couture anywhere around here,” she says. “Coming out, I was fascinated by the red carpet and Old Hollywood in particular, so I was like, ‘You’ve gotta mix things up. You need to give some edge, some glamour, take some chances.’ ”
The first celebrity to gamble on Zoe was Jennifer Garner. A last-minute Emmy emergency precipitated the call, which Zoe answered with a custom Narciso Rodriguez dress. “It was so much work, and I was so nervous, but it was incredible making a woman feel that beautiful,” Zoe recalls. “Jen and I started this love affair after that.” Kate Hudson, Demi Moore, Diaz, Kate Beckinsale and Debra Messing followed, raising Zoe’s profile.
