Reality of Fashion: Rachel Zoe a "Pox on Humanity" in NYT Review

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NYT writer Ginia Bellafante unloads her disgust on Rachel Zoe (who reportedly makes $6,000 a day) and her show, in a review today, which has some impressively searing highlights. Below, a selection:

"More than any other stylist working in Hollywood today, she doesn’t merely peddle clothes, she emblazons an image, turning cipher nobodies into pretend somebodies. Although she has put grown women with viable acting careers into gowns — Debra Messing, Cameron Diaz — she is known more generally for forging a look of girlish vacancy, one that says: 'I get up at noon. And then I spend my day refusing solid foods.'”

"The stylist is Frankenstein; all the world’s Lindsay Lohans are her Creature."

"Given that Ms. Zoe is already a pox on humanity — exploiting an aesthetic of dissipation, invading our collective consciousness and spraying it with dummy dust — it is amazing that 'The Rachel Zoe Project,' which focuses on her career, manages to send its audience deeper into the territory of smug NPR obsessives who won’t stop ranting about triviality’s conquest of the American soul."

"'The Real Housewives of Orange County' has led the recent wave of reality programming about mad consumption. But it’s a genre that feels downright unseemly as investment banks are dissolving, and unemployment stands at more than 6 percent."
· A Stylist Devoted to Making Idleness Look Chic [NYT]