Rachel Zoe On How To Style Fragrance With Every Look

Let’s get something straight: celebrity stylists didn’t exist before Rachel Zoe.

Sure, there were stylists for celebrities. But Rachel Zoe was the first stylist that became a celebrity. Like Emeril Lagasse for celebrity chefs, Rachel Zoe carved out a new category, creating a new goal for today’s young men and women to aspire to. Like with all growth, that goal no longer just means dressing famous faces — it encompasses a vast media, product, design, and philanthropy empire. All of that does not take away from where Zoe started. At the opening of our Zoom interview, I mentioned an exhaustive search for Western boots. Without a hesitation, she recommended a store just ten minutes from my home. And she was right. After our call, I found my dream boots after tireless weeks of searching and reconnoissance.

As of this week, Rachel Zoe can now add fragrances to her impressive tally of products to come off of her workbench. Starting with four unisex scents - Warrior, Empowered, Instinct, and Fearless - Zoe calls this endeavor, “Such a personal thing.”

She was 13 years-old when the fragrance bug first bit her, she recalls. It was Anais Anais, a fresh floral Eau de Toilette that peaked her teenage interests. Now, her tastes for perfumes have refined, and she enjoys pairing fragrance with her mood, event, or location. “In styling, I’d always smell things before events - the concept of fragrance with a look really started to resonate with me. In my mind, I’d style women with a fragrance.”

Zoe is even philosophical about scent, citing the common Proust phenomenon of sudden and involuntary evocations of childhood and lifetime memories associated with specific scents. “It represents different moments of life,” referring to fragrance. “I become obsessive with what fragrance means to you.” Her four fragrances symbolize her fluidity for change. “They’re interchangeable depending on where you’re going.”

“By day, I’d be more Instinct, and by night, I’d be more Warrior,” Zoe says about own her bergamot-floral and mandarin-rose fragrances respectively.

The packaging, Zoe admits, is inspired by her spirit animal: tigers. And while the mogul has an enviable closet, animal prints are one thing she feels a fierce warmth toward. “I’ve been buying animal print clothing since I had my own money - like, from my very first allowance.” Her second choice for spirit animal? “A koala,” she admits, given her maternal instinct to let sons Kaius, 6, and Skyler, 9, hang on her in-stride.

Made in the U.S., Zoe’s fragrance launch comes as a partnership with TPG - a company whose existing fragrance portfolio includes Monique Lhuillier and Derek Lam, among others. And while the fragrance, available exclusively on her website, has just launched, she’s already thinking of what’s next. Careful to quell her excitement and not to reveal too much, she lists home fragrance and candles and something to come in her near future, in-addition to more launches for her brand of bespoke product boxes, Curateur.

Nearing the end of our call, we momentarily return to the topic of Western boots. “I have to fully style you, though,” she says as she’s pensively running through an enormous mental inventory of current brands and each of their boot offerings to make sure there are none she’s overlooked. She then says something I come to realize is the unofficial cornerstone of her life, empire, and how she’s able to do what she does so well, “There are no half-measures.”