It was never a given that Jenna Lyons would return for a second season of “Real Housewives of New York City.”
After the first season aired, Ms. Lyons said on “The Tonight Show” that she “genuinely” didn’t know if she would come back. And though she had earned favor among fans — some had taken to inserting a swear word between her first and last name, like a rallying cry — she declined to appear at the popular fan event BravoCon, citing a conflict.
From the start, she wasn’t quite Bravo’s type: a discerning former fashion executive dropped into a fishbowl of screaming and scheming. Ms. Lyons preferred blue denim to busty gowns. She was New York’s first queer housewife but reluctant to open up about her personal life, irking some of her fellow cast members.
There was also a fight over her disinclination to fly coach on a group trip to Anguilla, although even that charmed some viewers, Ms. Lyons told The New York Times: “So many people stood up for me and were like, ‘I get it, I don’t want to fly coach either!’”
Her chief motivation for joining the show had been to promote her beauty business, she said, and recover some of the cultural cachet she had lost in 2017, when she left the job at J. Crew that made her famous.
In this, Ms. Lyons succeeded. “It was shocking to see the results,” she said. Her following on Instagram quadrupled, and LoveSeen, her false eyelashes company, profited from the exposure, too. The brand had been doing well in major American cities, but, she said, “we were struggling in places where people didn’t know who I was.” Reality television unleashed her — with her signature oversize glasses and barely buttoned tops — on the rest of the country.
