Why Did Jenna Lyons Join the Rebooted RHONY? (original) (raw)
Style|Jenna Lyons, Unlikely Housewife
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/25/style/rhony-jenna-lyons.html
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Credit...Yael Malka for The New York Times
Jenna Lyons, Unlikely Housewife
The famously stylish former president of J. Crew has joined the rebooted “Real Housewives of New York City.” Why?
Credit...Yael Malka for The New York Times
- June 25, 2023
Here is how it happened: Jenna Lyons was at the Wing in SoHo in December 2021, giving an interview to a podcast called “Dyking Out,” having recently been advised that she wasn’t doing enough to represent her community of gay women.
“I felt really badly,” she said a year later, over avocado toasts at Sant Ambroeus. “That was never really something that occurred to me.”
So she did the podcast, and about an hour into the conversation, the interviewers pitched an idea: Ms. Lyons as a cast member on “The Real Housewives of New York City.”
“I’m down,” she replied: two words that may have changed her life.
Ms. Lyons, the former creative director and president of J. Crew, was an icon of early 2010s style. She was a high-low priestess, evangelizing sequins as day wear. She modernized prep, dressing Michelle Obama when she was the first lady — and therefore America.
In her crew neck sweaters and bright lipstick, Ms. Lyons served as a walking advertisement for a company at the peak of its success. It was not normal for fashion enthusiasts to recognize the head designers of mall brands, yet they knew Ms. Lyons. So did many casual shoppers, regularly browsing “Jenna’s Picks” on the J. Crew website.
But when she left the company in 2017, Ms. Lyons also left the public eye. She didn’t really return until late 2020, when she hosted a design competition show on Max for one season — a move into the reality TV world. Still, the announcement, last October, that she’d star on the upcoming season of “The Real Housewives of New York City,” drew much attention.
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