Who is Rachel Ray?

I discovered the line while I was on lunch break downtown Montreal. And, low and behold, I stumbled across this very fashionable and, reasonably affordable line. Now, often times I see clothes I like, but in this case, everything I saw was wearable both for work and casual wear. This brought on the question: Who is Rachel Roy? Is it that cooking show lady? No, that would be Rachel Ray. Well who is Rachel Roy, then? And why haven't I heard of her? So, I went online to the website: http://www.rachelroy.com/ and was delighted to see all of the fashion lines and even online shopping! But, it still didn't answer my question. Nowhere on the website does it talk about Rachel, where she came from – and better yet, where she sees herself, and her line, going.

This right here is the Real Rachel Roy

I uncovered the Real Rachel Roy on Wikipedia; where she came from, who she married and what her story was (well, the gist of it). Rachel grew up in California, and then later moved to New York. She quickly landed a job as an intern at Rocawear and worked her way up to Creative Director. This is where she met her husband, Damon Dash. But, shortly after Damon went bankrupt, Rachel divorced him (smart girl). In 2005 Rachel launched her line and received a Bollywood industry award for her contribution to fashion. During summer of 2009, Rachel and Estelle, the Grammy-award winning star tweeted their collaboration of a jewelry line on Roy's twitter feed. Rachel Roy is sold in several high end department stores, including Bloomingdale's and Neiman Marcus. In August 2009, Rachel launched her diffusion line, RACHEL Rachel Roy, which is sold exclusively at Macy’s. Here in Canada, you can find both lines sold at The Bay.


Here are some of my favourite's from her spring / summer 2011 line: