I Like to Watch

Shiny, pretty people work hard to keep their stuff hidden, from the tragicomic celebrity stylist of "The Rachel Zoe Project" to the sleek but suffering suits of "Mad Men."

By Heather Havrilesky

Read more: Drama, TV, Style, Arts & Entertainment, Reality TV, Heather Havrilesky, Bravo, I Like to Watch

Sept. 14, 2008 | I have a friend who's a professional organizer. That means she gets paid to organize other people's stuff. Most of her clients are wealthy stay-at-home moms with maids and husbands who work and kids who are in school all day. This means that the onerous task of organizing all of their family's stuff rests on these women's shoulders alone.

Can you imagine the pressure? Not surprisingly, the women are often quite traumatized by just how hopelessly disorganized all of their stuff is. Everywhere they go, there it is, falling out of walk-in closets, shoved into the back corners of three-car garages, spilling out of guest bedrooms and spare offices and dens, taunting them!

The isolation must be intense. "Shouldn't my black sweaters be folded together, in the same part of my closet?" they ask, but no one is there to answer. "Should I keep this old candle, or throw it out? I never really liked the scent!" they wonder, but no one responds. How can they be expected to make such big decisions on their own? The silence must be deafening, as they pace from closet to closet, room to room, their eyes scanning all of their stuff. How do they control their nerves, as they flip nervously through their copies of Martha Stewart Living magazine, with its neatly labeled boxes and baskets and elegant little nooks and crannies for everything under the sun, so no stuff is ever showing!

My friend is a hero to these women. And while many of us may feel powerless as we watch America's economic, political and cultural dominance as a nation slip off the radar, at least we're getting the upper hand on household clutter. Yes, we may have become a country of dimwitted, angry animals, preoccupied by empty distractions and doomed to be ignored on the global stage forevermore. But at least our stuff will be organized.

Oof, there it is!
If that depresses you a little, then maybe you can appreciate the stomach-churning, head-spinning, soul-sucking feeling of vertigo that you, too, can enjoy by alternating between coverage of another disastrously shallow and moron-centric presidential race and the premiere of "The Rachel Zoe Project" on Bravo (10 p.m. Tuesdays).

Now, far be it from me to proclaim anyone's career trivial or meaningless. I watch televised entertainments for a living, a job that ranks, on the scale of "important and meaningful" work, somewhere between assembly line worker at a plastic spoon factory (Hello, Roseanne!) and Hooters waitress (with Hooters waitress clearly a step up from TV critic, since TV critics don't bring joy unto the world of hot-wings-eating frat boys by doing the Bouncing Booby Birthday Dance in orange short-shorts upon request).

Even so, there's something disturbing about watching celebrity stylist Rachel Zoe march around her little studio in her enormous sunglasses and enormous fur coats and enormous gold chains under an enormous tangle of tousled blond hair, gushing over the extreme beauty and funky delightfulness of clients wearing wildly expensive designer dresses. She expresses her enthusiasm using just four phrases:

"That is absolutely bananas."

"You are going to kill it."

"You're shutting it down."

"I die! I die."

It's not that Rachel Zoe isn't good at what she does. She's quite skilled at rifling through $5,000 gowns and foisting this one or that one on her pretty celebutante clients and then stepping back and saying "I die" 50 times in a row, with feeling. She knows that these women must leave her studio and journey to that red carpet knowing that they're absolutely bananas and they are going to kill it, period point blank. Zoe herself describes the process in almost sexual terms -- albeit in her faux-bored, Valley Girl rasp: "I look at my client, she looks at me and I, like, gasp for air. She feels it, she owns it. She's like, 'This is it.' And I'm like, 'It's so it.'"

And it's not that Rachel Zoe isn't an object of extreme curiosity. This is a woman who made a huge name for herself by putting the same gigantic sunglasses and gold chains and platform shoes that she wears on all of her celebrity clients. Think Nicole Richie. Think Jessica Simpson. Think Lindsay Lohan. All of the celebutards go straight to Zoe for their "unique" Rachel Zoe "look."

In truth, Rachel Zoe should be a real inspiration to all of the perpetually distracted, somewhat frivolous but enthusiastic C-students of the world: You really can make something of yourself. Don't let those somber, stodgy thinkers out there tell you otherwise! If you tirelessly self-promote, marry a super-supportive metrosexual investment banker and hire a really capable, hard-working "associate," you too can have a brilliant career!

Still, there's something about the self-important whirlwind that Rachel Zoe is caught up in, the swirling, stormy egocentric gusts that blow her hither and thither, to and fro, from her "brand development" meeting, where she clutches her latte and talks about how frightened she is by the immense promise of having her very own line of accessories and fashions and bath mats and bed linens to her meetings with her associate, Taylor, who explains that Zoe must follow the day's schedule and not dillydally or stop to pick up $10,000 of random vintage couture dresses and accessories at her favorite boutique like she seems to do every 20 minutes or so.

Watching this curious spectacle, you can't help thinking that if Zoe were to, say, skim through a copy of the New York Times, or scan some of the news on Google every now and then, if she were to briefly familiarize herself with the economy's downward spiral, with worldwide food shortages, with the energy crisis, well ... Could she still run around town, looking like Ice-T shrunken down to tiny, white, anorexic proportions, chattering nervously about her brand while she charges thousands in luxury accessories and fashions on her credit card?

Probably. Because if anyone can shut out the universe and sharpen their focus on their own navel, it's Rachel Zoe. But the point is, Zoe's world starts to feel very small and claustrophobic very fast -- as small as her cluttered studio, stuffed to the gills with shiny dresses and hundreds of thousands of dollars in jewelry and purses and shoes. Being in Zoe's company as she blinks her gigantic fake eyelashes and frets over her schedule and says "I die, I die" over and over again, I start to feel slightly short of breath and the walls start closing in on me and it's as if there are no food riots and no wars, there is just the unbearable, airless, migraine-inducing press of fabulousness. It's absolutely bananas and it's so it and I die, I die, I just die.

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