In her image
At some point over the last few months, it began to feel like an assembly line: Jessica Simpson, Nicole Richie, Lindsay Lohan ....
All of a sudden, you couldn’t tell them apart: the drapey gowns clinging to skinny hips, the long blond tendrils falling over matchstick-thin arms, the smoky eyes accenting bottle-bronzed faces.
“Attack of the Clones” was the headline in Women’s Wear Daily. “Lindsay Lohan’s Double Visions,” quipped People magazine above a photo of Lohan and Richie.
It might look like a peroxide wind is blowing through Hollywood, but there’s actually a mastermind behind this look-of-the-moment: celebrity stylist Rachel Zoe.
And it turns out many of her clients look just like her: wispy-thin, golden-tressed, bronzed and sexy.
Zoe -- she was Rachel Zoe Rosenzweig until her agent urged her to drop her last name -- is one of a handful of sought-after Hollywood stylists who earn up to $6,000 a day. She dresses some of the world’s most visible teen idols for film junkets, premieres and magazine shoots. (Mischa Barton, Jennifer Garner, Salma Hayek, Kate Hudson and Brittany Murphy are also clients.) As such, her power as an image maker cannot be underestimated. A recent entry on a Lohan fan site read: “I would do anything to look like her!”
It’s not that no one has ever done the bohemian chic look before. Kate Moss and Sienna Miller have a similar, much imitated style, mixing vintage with modern-day romantic pieces, and inspiring designers such as Chloe’s Phoebe Philo and Stella McCartney. For these English style icons, fashion is effortless. But in Hollywood, women are used to walking the red carpet. They have to look “done,” with every detail perfect, down to makeup and hair. So Zoe has created her own brand of studied effortless chic.
“I’m not trying to make people look like me,” she said during a recent interview at her Beverly Hills apartment, which has racks of designer clothing crammed in the entryway. “But when you spend a lot of time with someone, you rub off on each other. I think I’m kind of an older sister to Lindsay and Nicole.”
In fact, it’s not uncommon for Zoe, 33, to dress “her girls” as she calls them, out of her own overstuffed closet, full of free clothes given to her by designers in hopes that she or one of her clients will be photographed in them.
Zoe’s style is grounded in 1970s sex appeal -- part biker chick, part disco denizen. During the day, she favors super-skinny jeans, sky-high studded or python stilettos by Gucci or Alexander McQueen, cropped Chanel jackets, and gold chains with shark-tooth charms from Kaviar and Kind. Her face is bronzed and her eyes lined and colored with frosted shadow. For evening, Zoe goes for drapey goddess gowns -- vintage Chloe or Yves Saint Laurent, and always clingy. (A recent purchase from Decades was a one-shoulder purple chiffon Halston.)
Thinness is essential. Rather than surgically enhanced breasts, Zoe has the reedy, flat-chested figure of hard-partying 1970s rock stars and Studio 54 regulars -- gold dust women like Bianca Jagger, Diane von Furstenberg, Diana Ross and Stevie Nicks. (Fashion insiders have whispered privately that she is single-handedly bringing anorexia back.)
The sultry 1960s and ‘70s look was championed by Tom Ford in the 1990s, so it’s no surprise that Zoe “worships” the designer, who until recently worked for both Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent. “There is virtually nothing that man has designed that I wouldn’t wear,” she said.
But for a 19-year-old like Lohan, the boho Barbie look can come across as a little world-weary, especially with the kohl-rimmed bedroom eyes and stark blond hair. Lohan had already dyed her hair for an upcoming role as Meryl Streep’s daughter in “Prairie Home Companion” when she and Zoe started working on a new image in New York. “I remember sitting on her hotel room floor and saying, ‘Now what do you want from me?’ ” The overall goal was to step up Lohan’s style, she said, taking inspiration from Moss by day, in Balenciaga and Chloe, and Old Hollywood by night, with Brigitte Bardot lashes, heavy eyeliner and vintage YSL and Valentino dresses.
“I am the biggest fashion-obsessed person in the world,” said Zoe. “But in Lindsay, I feel like I may have met my match. If she wasn’t an actress, she would be a stylist, because she would have to be.” Zoe remembers a night Lohan dropped by her apartment at 9 p.m. to pick up a bag and ended up staying four hours, trying on clothes and taking Polaroid pictures “just for fun.”
Zoe’s apartment is jammed with hundreds of designer pieces -- a vintage YSL safari jacket, a lavender Chanel parka, Balenciaga boots, a Gucci black woven-leather biker jacket, plus jeans by Levi’s, Jordache, Hudson, Rock & Republic and more -- much of it unworn, with the tags still on it.
Splayed out on the marble floor of her bathroom are 14 shoeboxes filled to the brims with jewelry by Chanel, YSL, Claude Montana, Dior and Givenchy. In preparation for moving to a new house, she recently dropped off six garbage bags full of clothes at resale shop Decades. “I’ve done four edits and I will probably do one more,” she said, speaking about her closet in fashion editor parlance.
Like most stylists, she doesn’t have any formal fashion training. “I was always dressing my friends, and I started finding myself dressing up to go hiking or to a diner. And I would ask myself, ‘What am I getting so dressed up for?’ But it was kind of all I knew how to do,” said Zoe, who was raised in Short Hills, N.J.
When she was 13, she traveled to Paris for the first time on a family vacation. “I had saved every dime and dollar, and I walked right into Louis Vuitton and bought a bag.” She still has it, along with hundreds of others she has collected since, which are stored in the foyer in a closet of their own. Recently, she’s been carrying the latest “it” bag, the Chloe Silverado in bronze python, a thank-you gift from the French fashion house.
Zoe attended George Washington University, where she met her husband, Roger Berman, an investment banker. He was working as a waiter and she as a hostess at a popular Georgetown harborfront restaurant. She majored in sociology and psychology. (“Some would say that helps in my job,” she said.)
After college, she moved to New York and began working as a stylist at YM magazine. She describes the experience as “a crash course” and remembers going back and forth to L.A. on almost a weekly basis for celebrity shoots and fashion features. After four years, she broke out on her own as a freelance stylist working with musicians such as the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Enrique Iglesias and Vanessa Carlton. “There were a lot of sleepless nights, finding out at 11 p.m. that you had to be on a plane at 7 a.m.,” she said. “I don’t mean to sound superficial, because we are not saving lives. But that’s the kind of pressure that the industry puts on a stylist to create a certain image.”
The occupation of wardrobe stylist did not even exist until 10 years ago, when fashion designers and celebrities realized the revenue that could be brought in from red carpet photos. Now a stylist is an essential celebrity handler, on a par with a publicist or a trainer.
How dependent can they get? For Zoe, until August, it’s all Lindsay, all the time. She is traveling with the actress on the “Herbie: Fully Loaded” European press tour. Before leaving, she will fit and photograph Lohan in hundreds of outfits, packing them in trunks for the four-city, two-week trip.
“This girl went through two trunks of clothes in 48 hours in New York,” Zoe said, “so I would imagine there will be eight or 10 trunks. She’ll wear at least three outfits a day.” With all the exposure, it’s no surprise that stylists are becoming sought-after stars in their own right. After dressing Halle Berry, Phillip Bloch signed with the William Morris Agency, published a book and became a spokesman for Lycra and Visa. Outfitting Nicole Kidman elevated L’Wren Scott’s profile so much that the beauty is now dating Mick Jagger. Two years ago, Zoe signed with the Margaret Maldonado Agency in L.A. and seems to be making her way toward the red carpet herself.
She’s begun preaching the virtues of tan and slinky to the rest of America, as a regular contributor to Cosmopolitan magazine and a guest on “Oprah,” and she was recently hired as a spokeswoman for GapBody, where her duties include “Bra Bar” fit clinics for customers, despite the fact that most days she doesn’t even wear a bra.
