Rachel Zoe, Who Made Stylists Into Celebrities, Is Back on Reality TV

To hear her tell it, Rachel Zoe never meant for all this to happen.

“Accidentally famous,” she said last week in her hotel room at the Mercer hotel in New York. “Truthfully.”

And yet there she was, surrounded by the trappings of fame: swathed in a white cotton robe, basking in the glow of a ring light while a makeup artist applied dabs of foundation to her face, which was framed by tousled waves of honey-colored hair, and surrounded by racks of dresses and fur coats with vertiginous black heels neatly lined up underneath. All this in preparation for her to attend the Michael Kors fashion show that afternoon at Lincoln Center.

“I was a behind-the-scenes person my whole life,” she said. “I became a stylist so that I could be behind the scenes. I’m the person who got offered the lead in a play and then asked for a supporting role.”

“Or,” she added, “like, the tree in the back.”

But Ms. Zoe did, in fact, become famous. She is known, arguably, as the first celebrity stylist — not the first person to style celebrities, but as a stylist whose own profile matched (and, at times, eclipsed) that of the starlets she dressed. She cemented this reputation with her reality TV show “The Rachel Zoe Project,” which ran on the Bravo network starting in 2008. On it, she sat front-row at fashion shows, air-kissed household-name designers, called in frocks from luxury brands for her A-list clients to wear to high-profile events and shopped.

Boy, did she ever shop. (An unofficial tagline on the show was “I die,” a common response to seeing a particularly fetching item while browsing a designer store.)