Rachel Zoe, a Vintage Pioneer Lost in the Modern World

The pioneering trend maestro crafted the newfound "celebrity stylist" role from archival Cavalli and chunky necklaces in the mid-2000s, defining the aesthetics of the era for a generation of Hollywood's young glitterati and the Macy's shoppers desperate for their look. It wasn't that everyone wanted to be Rachel Zoe, and it wasn't even that everyone wanted to dress like Nicole Richie or Cameron Diaz either. But the images of them, gussied up by Zoe, became synonymous with the decade for people with short memories and those who didn't live through it. I could trace a line from tabloids to Tumblr blogs and then incorrectly attributed posts on Instagram and poorly constructed insights from 20 year olds on TikTok.

Imagine that line is also an overly referential joke about cerulean sweaters from The Devil Wears Prada 2. Fitting, as looks from the original film are likewise infused with Zoe's DNA.

At least as far as Zoe and her acolytes and the young people miscategorizing "Y2K" photos online are concerned, everyone — and they do mean everyone — wanted to dress like Rachel Zoe. The lie of it is more real because she manifested it, much like her job of "celebrity stylist."

I've been mulling over the dimensions of her career as a reality TV star and fashion circuit personality frequently in the days preceding her debut on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, a comeback to the network and to reality TV that many have clamored for over the years. Zoe, following her exit, hopped off the red carpet treadmill to focus on the many licensing deals she spun out from her ascent as the defining image architect of the 2000s.

Her newsletter The Zoe Report chugs along, and as far as any onlooker has been concerned, the once most famous stylist in the world has remained entirely indifferent to the concept of fame, reality TV or even styling in the last decade. That has changed significantly in the last year, following news she'd been poached for a comeback by Bravo on its flagship Real Housewives franchise. In a trailer for the upcoming season, she jokes with her new casemates that she's "lived here before." In interviews, she's teased a return to the red carpet in some fashion or. another.

Zoe is also mid-divorce from her ex-husband Roger Berman, who ran her companies with her from behind his mop of once-infamous hair. The aftermath of that split, alongside her career resurgence, will be splashed across the Bravo-verse like in the old days, when her problems mostly concerned gossipy tabloids and the full force of a cultural zeitgeist crashing down on top of her.

This is not merely a comeback, I'd guess. It's a conquest.

There is much land and legacy to be reclaimed in her return, arriving at the shores of a word that is completely unlike the one she left a decade ago. The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills is not a one woman show; her castmates are fractious, tribalistic and overtly vengeful. The women she's now surrounded by are, in many ways, the living manifestations of the tabloid culture she ran from in the early 2010s, one which hounded her over everything from her weight, to her responsibility for images of overly thin models and actress, and even her alleged drug use — things she all firmly denies, then and now, in buzzy profiles at the usual websites.

Over the last 15 years, its rotating cast have primarily concerned themselves with plot lines about bloggers, tabloids, paparazzi, gossip and all the trifling details of the Hollywood gossip machine. They race to expose another's secrets to hide their own. They weaponize intimacy and keep daggers up their blouse sleeves. I'm forced to wonder if Zoe's desire to correct the record, so to speak, overrode her common sense. Perhaps licensing handbags to discount retailers doesn't pay like it used too.

She also returns at a particularly sticky moment for female celebrities, especially those unlucky enough to get posted on the socials of fashion and entertainment magazines. The media has always been particularly cruel to women whose bodies become the story, against their will or otherwise, and Zoe is no exception. She was hounded relentlessly for her weight and the weight of her clients, with claims of drug use and disordered eating having reached a fever pitch only matched by the ghosts they left behind, clinging to recently proliferated weight loss medications and the receding "body positivity movement."

Judging by her run of profiles and interviews ahead of the premiere, she's determined to rewrite the history books. Like in The Cut, where the interviewer describes her as "aggrieved" on the subject, with Zoe insisting that actresses used to tell her: “You never let us leave your studio without eating!”

I am not interested in re-litigating the responsibility of one woman in a system that dwarfs her, not when either that same system or the media propping it up changed very much in the last ten years. Moreso, I'm stuck on the fact that figures like Zoe went the way of the A-list red carpet celebrity in the last decade precisely because the heavens moved closer to the Earth. The ethereal and thin figures she draped in silk and vintage fur grew increasingly accessible, demystified, their bodies and personal lives up for auction on social media and on podcasts hosted by standup comedians.

Her return, if anything, might signal the planets have once again shifted; the heavens are moving back away from earth. Celebrities, once cast down to the mortal realm with the rest of us, have built a spaceship off planet — they've rigged the game again, really, growing increasingly curated, inaccessible, even thin. I find it no coincidence that now is when Zoe enters stage left.

Or, maybe, they've finally sorted out the wi-fi up where she's been adrift in space all these years. Just in time, thankfully, for her to beam a fresh batch of sunglass designs back down to earth.

Images via Getty