Long before Rachel Zoe became one of Hollywood’s most recognizable stylists, built her own fashion empire or held a diamond on “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” she got an unexpected phone call that helped change the direction of her career.
The job? Helping style a then-16-year-old Britney Spears for the 1998 music video that would introduce her to the world.
Zoe revealed that working on Spears’ “…Baby One More Time” video was actually her first-ever freelance styling job, a full-circle piece of fashion history considering where both women’s careers went next.
“My first-ever freelance job was working on [Britney Spears’ 1998 music video for] ‘…Baby One More Time,’” Zoe told Page Six’s “Virtual Reali-Tea.”
And Zoe didn’t exactly spend years chasing down the opportunity. She landed it because someone else couldn’t make it.
Rachel Zoe Landed the Britney Spears Job Almost by Accident
At the time, Zoe was working at YM, the teen magazine where she had already spent years styling celebrities and musicians as part of her day job.
“I’ve only had one job in my life [where] I had a boss, which was I worked at a magazine,” Zoe recalled. “I worked with a lot of pop stars and actors like Gwen Stefani and blah, blah, blah. It all went on and on.”
Her move into freelance styling began when one of her colleagues, who also accepted outside styling work, couldn’t make one of her jobs and asked Zoe to fill in for a day.
That job happened to be a Britney Spears music video.
“[A colleague] at the magazine that I was working at did a lot of freelance work at the time. And she couldn’t do this job and so she asked me if I could cover for her and help her on one of the days [of shooting] and so I did,” Zoe explained.
The timing couldn’t have been bigger.
“…Baby One More Time” became Spears’ breakout hit, while its music video turned the teenage singer into a pop culture phenomenon. The schoolgirl look Spears wore in the video would become inseparable from the song itself.
For Zoe, meanwhile, one freelance assignment opened the door to an entirely different career.
One Music Video Helped Change Rachel Zoe’s Career
Zoe eventually left YM and went out on her own at 25, despite not having a roster of clients waiting for her. She has previously recalled that the connections she made while working at the magazine helped her establish herself once she took the leap.
Spears became part of an impressive list of musicians Zoe worked with early in her freelance career. She also styled the Backstreet Boys, Enrique Iglesias, Jessica Simpson and Ashlee Simpson before eventually becoming synonymous with Hollywood red-carpet fashion.
Even the relatively modest budgets of those early music-video shoots helped shape Zoe’s eye. She recalled sourcing clothing from all over, including vintage pieces, because stylists had to make limited budgets stretch across large casts and groups of extras.
Her career would eventually take her far beyond music videos.
Zoe went on to dress stars including Jennifer Garner, Anne Hathaway and other major Hollywood names, launch her own businesses and become a television personality through “The Rachel Zoe Project.” She later returned to Bravo as a cast member on RHOBH.
But decades before all of that, Zoe was still a magazine editor taking a freelance assignment because a co-worker needed someone to cover for her.
It just happened to be for Britney Spears, on the set of one of the defining music videos of the late 1990s.
