September 08: Rachel Zoe and Kate Hudson attend Bravo's The Rachel Zoe Project series launch party at The Gramercy Park Hotel in New York City.
Rachel Zoe dresses high profile celebrities and as a result demands high fees rumored at upwards of $6,000 a day.
The Rachel Zoe Project on Bravo is about the inner workings of Zoe’s world as she attempts to turn her style into a brand.
Zoe makes the perfect reality star and the decision to have a cable show was really a no brainer as she didn’t have much to lose in the general public’s eye. While respected in the fashion world for dressing high profile stars like Demi Moore, Cameron Diaz and Kate Hudsen, Zoe’s public image desperately needed a make over due to accusations of drug use and promoting the stick-thin image. Los Angeles Times once claimed Zoe was “single-handedly bringing anorexia back.”
“I don’t think it’s fair to say that I’m responsible because I’m a thin person, that because I’m influencing their style I’m influencing what they eat,” Zoe stated. “There was this crazy rumor that I was getting diet pills from Mexico and distributing them. I was like, ‘Okay, I’ve never even tried cocaine. I don’t do drugs — I’m too much of a control freak’.”
But Zoe’s past drama in the press seemed to finally work in her favor. The premiere episode of her reality show got higher ratings than the first episode of Project Runway with 527,000 eyes.
Bloggers immediately took to the Internet and typed they were surprised how personable Zoe came across on television. The mainstream press, however, turned out to be a different story. New York Times television critic Ginia Bellafante called Zoe “a pox on humanity” and her “mad consumption … downright unseemly.”
Zoe, who reportedly cried after reading the NYT review, once again defended herself telling the LA Times: “It was the strangest thing in the world for someone who has never met me to accuse me of making our society superficial. Judging the state of society based on me? A ‘pox’? This show is not an effort to solve world issues. It’s a bit of glamour, a bit of an escape.”
Zoe got the last laugh as despite criticism show ratings continued to climb and we here at Style Seen Daily know that Zoe is going no where but up, up, up.
SSD Co-Founder Crystal Fambrini profiled Zoe for Current TV.
