Style icon becomes unlikely Housewife
Former J. Crew executive Lyons lands spot in reality show cast
Here is how it happened: In December 2021, Jenna Lyons was 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. “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: 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.
Lyons, the former creative director and president of J. Crew, was an icon of early 2010s style. She modernized prep, dressing Michelle Obama when she was the first lady — and therefore America.
In her crew-neck sweaters and bright lipstick, 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 Lyons. So did many casual shoppers, regularly browsing “Jenna’s Picks” on the J. Crew website.
But when she left the company in 2017, Lyons also left the public eye. She didn’t really return until late 2020, when she hosted a design competition show on HBO Max (now just Max) for one season — a move into the reality TV world. Still, the announcement, in October, that she’d star on the coming season of “The Real Housewives of New York City” drew much attention.
Lyons, 55, was known for being tasteful, aspirational. The Housewives were a brawling pageant of guilty pleasure, redefining the cultural meaning of “housewife.” They were flamboyant, chaotic. Two of them went to prison.
And yet Lyons embraced the idea.
In February 2022, when another gay podcaster pasted Lyons’ face onto a promotional image of the “RHONY” cast, Lyons shared it on her Instagram story, writing: “Who do I need to call?? I am available.” It was a bit of a joke, she said, “one of those moments where somebody posits something that seems completely unlikely, and out of humor, I said yes.”
Still, she forwarded her post to Andy Cohen, the Bravo host and executive producer of the Housewives franchise, whose Christmas parties she had attended.
“You know what … this is a good idea,” Cohen replied via direct message. Lyons sent a tilted-head-laughing emoji. Then a dual-redexclamation-point emoji. Then a heart emoji.
One month later, Cohen announced that Bravo was in the process of rebooting “RHONY” with an entirely new cast. He wanted a new “multicultural group of friends” from “diverse backgrounds, races and religions” for its 14th season, he told Variety. Several months after that, Lyons got a call asking if she would do a screen test.
For her part, Lyons believed appearing on television could help advance her business pursuits, like her false eyelash brand LoveSeen, which she founded in 2020. She also liked the idea of bringing some queerness to a largely straight franchise.
But one day, while Lyons was reciting this reasoning to a close friend, she said, the friend stopped her: “‘You want the attention,’ ” the friend said. “‘You don’t want to fade into oblivion.’ ”
And it was true, Lyons realized. After she left J. Crew, the fashion industry, once enamored with her, seemed to move on. There were no enticing job offers and fewer fancy invitations.
“I really faded away,” she said. “It was such a big job, and I was well-respected, and I had a big life in that way, and then it kind of all went away.”
There are famous fashion people, like Lyons, and then there are famous reality stars, like Bethenny Frankel, NeNe Leakes or Lisa Vanderpump. They each have more than 3 million followers on Instagram; Lyons has about 275,000. She distinctly remembers one piece of advice imparted by Cohen while discussing the role: “‘All I can say is you cannot hide. Once you’re on the show, you cannot hide.’ ”
For her role as a Real Housewife, she told Bravo she never wanted a microphone on her teenage son, Beckett. And before “RHONY” filming began, senior executives even called her to express their worry “that I was going to be too controlled on television,” she said.
“I am controlled,” she said in December, a few weeks into filming the show. “If you want me to not be controlled, if that’s what you’re looking for, I’m not the right person for you,” she said.
Cut to early April, several weeks after the season had wrapped. All that control,
she reflected, had kind of “backfired.”
“Out of hubris, or a sort of egoistic view of what I could handle, I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve got this, I’ve done this before,’ ” said Lyons. “When it really comes down to it, you end up being vulnerable, no matter how you slice it.”
Cohen referred to this as “the process,” as in, “there’s no escaping the process.”
“I mean, you’re not drafted to be on the ‘Housewives’; you either sign up or not,” said Cohen, who said that Lyons got “really vulnerable.”
That does not mean she succumbed to certain cliches of the genre, Lyons said, like drunkenly screaming at castmates. (She has been sober
for about two years.) But amid several moments she described as tense — arguments among the women over slights, real and imagined — she realized that by trying to “maintain a certain version of myself,” by keeping her guard up, she’d inadvertently created more tension.
For Lyons, the group dynamic of the show ended up playing “on every insecurity that I have that I sort of forgot about,” she said, including, as a child, not being heard or accepted in large groups. People may have listened to her at J. Crew, but those were her employees. Her castmates didn’t have to listen to her.
That group included Sai De Silva, a content creator; Ubah Hassan, a model;
Jessel Taank, a publicist; Erin Lichy, a real estate agent; and Brynn Whitfield, a communications consultant. While the new cast is more diverse in terms of race and background than the previous “RHONY” casts, the women are still recognizably Housewives, competitively glamorous and outrageous.
A few months later, I asked Lyons if she had any regrets about the way she had approached the show, which starts July 16. She said she didn’t know yet.
“Maybe I’ll look nice,” she said. “Maybe I’ll look smart. Maybe I’ll look stuck up. Who the hell knows?
“I’m nervous. I’m an easy target. I’m, like, an old white lady. Take me down. It’s fine.”