Rachel Zoe, a blonde with a relaxed perm and roots that are visible on purpose, is a fashion stylist, which in her fortunate case means that she dresses celebrities, reportedly for up to $6,000 a day. As one of her assistants explained in the premiere episode of “The Rachel Zoe Project” (Tuesdays on Bravo): “We don’t just dress clients for award shows. We do premieres, personal appearances, personal shopping. We pretty much do everything.”

Even that sells Zoe short. More than any other stylist working in Hollywood today, she doesn’t merely peddle clothes, she emblazons an image, turning cipher nobodies into pretend somebodies. Although she has put grown women with viable acting careers into gowns – Debra Messing, Cameron Diaz – she is known more generally for forging a look of girlish vacancy, one that says: “I get up at noon. And then I spend my day refusing solid foods.”

A Starbucks cup is essential to the entire gestalt. The look conveys idleness, and its uncanny effect has been to make people who don’t do anything famous for doing nothing. Styling celebrities in her own strung-out ’70s glam style – Grecian tops over lean trousers, boxy miniskirts, visible clavicles, bug-eyed sunglasses, heavy gold necklaces, big rings – Zoe has landed her clients on the pages of magazines like Us with an impressive regularity.

It was her foresight to notice that tabloids had pages to fill and couldn’t always do that with photos of Angelina Jolie on her way to an orphanage. It is largely because of her that the name Nicole Richie is more familiar than the name Nicolas Sarkozy. The stylist is Frankenstein; all the world’s Lindsay Lohans are her Creature.

Given that Zoe is already a pox on humanity – exploiting an aesthetic of dissipation, invading our collective consciousness and spraying it with dummy dust – it is amazing that “The Rachel Zoe Project,” which focuses on her career, manages to send its audience deeper into the territory of smug NPR obsessives who won’t stop ranting about triviality’s conquest of the American soul. First I hated the show for passing Zoe off as an innovator when all she does is recycle a look that has held appeal since Tom Ford’s days at Gucci. Then I hated it for turning me into Max von Sydow in “Hannah and Her Sisters,” a cranky old person hungering for anachronisms.

“The Real Housewives of Orange County” has led the recent wave of reality programming about mad consumption. But it’s a genre that feels downright unseemly as investment banks are dissolving, and unemployment stands at more than 6 percent. It isn’t merely that “Rachel Zoe” lumbers along, asking us to get excited about a corporate work in progress – it’s also that the timing couldn’t be nuttier.

WHEN TO WATCH

“The Rachel Zoe Project,”

10 p.m. Tuesdays on Bravo