Because I have been watching the new series of The Real Housewives Of New York City (RHONY) – in which former J Crew creative director and president Jenna Lyons is an unlikely cast member – I can’t help but feel a bit starstruck when I walk into her light-filled loft apartment in SoHo, Manhattan, and see her unlacquered brass splashback.

Lyons is impressive herself, obviously: she looks chic even in a green striped bathrobe, getting her hair blow-dried, wearing her trademark dark-rimmed glasses, with her little dog Popeye on her lap. But the splashback, which runs the length of an entire wall in her kitchen and gleams at me, seductively, has become almost as famous. I’ve seen it on Pinterest and interior design TikTok, and it served as the setting for an on-screen RHONY cocktail party, which degenerated into reality TV-appropriate bickering and weeping.

Lyons is one of our era’s pre-eminent tastemakers, best known for her longstanding, high-profile role at cult American store J Crew. During her tenure, the company captured the zeitgeist: Michele Obama wore the brand frequently, while Lyons became a high priestess of high-low street style (if you’ve ever worn a fancy skirt with a striped T-shirt, or sequins in the daytime, you’ve felt her influence). She also introduced this stylistic tension to interiors by juxtaposing old and new, traditional with modern, in the J-Crew stores, helping to forge the eclectic look that is now the norm.

Since leaving J Crew in 2017, Lyons has launched a raft of projects, including a fake eyelashes business, LoveSeen, and an interior-design consultancy. Joining RHONY was an unexpected swerve for someone whose business is taste and refinement. She did it, she says, because her lashes weren’t selling as well in the US cities where she was less well-known. The supplier, Target, told her to do something to drive awareness. RHONY was not on her bingo card, but when an offer came in for a rebooted series, with a diverse cast that aimed to reflect New York City more accurately, she realised, ‘this is an advertising campaign that I could never afford.’ She adds, laughing, ‘I did have to sacrifice my soul – but I can buy it back!’

She says shooting the show was pretty baffling. ‘The closest you can come to Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. All of your social cues, all the ways you’ve moved through the world, do not apply.’ She was worried about her image from the outset. ‘I was guarded. I was careful. That, I think, comes across,’ she says. The other cast members, who put themselves out there more ‘are the show – I’m an annex. If the show was just me, people would have been asleep.’ For all her modesty, though, the critical consensus is that she played a blinder – just interesting enough to cause friction in subtle ways, without embarrassing herself.

The show exposed a new generation to her aesthetic (‘I’m making Jenna Lyons’ apartment my vision board for life,’ says a typical fan post on Tiktok). Many are drawn to the personality of her apartment, with its mishmash of colours, materials and textures. ‘I’ve been told I have sort of idiosyncratic taste,’ says Lyons, with customary understatement. ‘I look at developing a room with the same principles as putting an outfit together – mixing textures, colours, elements of shine versus matte… I think it feels like someone actually made these choices; it doesn’t necessarily feel like a showroom.’

When Lyons bought the apartment 10 years ago, she was in another time of change, moving out of a brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where she had lived with her husband of nine years, artist Vincent Mazeau. She had felt isolated there, with a punishing commute on top of long hours. ‘I did not do well,’ she says. ‘The day I got divorced I looked for apartments in the city.’

Originally an artist’s studio with no interior walls, and a collapsing ceiling, the loft was a true blank canvas. The interior design was inspired by items she had seen and loved over many years: the huge, faded salmonpink couch, for example, was inspired by the colour, but not the shape, of Mick Jagger’s couch, which she saw in a newspaper. The huge sink in her powder room was inspired by another gigantic sink, in Italian print house Ratti, where she used to buy fabrics when she worked for J Crew, though that was marble and hers is onyx.

Looking back now, she wonders if she went a bit over the top with the renovation. So much of it – the light switches, the doors – is custom-made that ‘I feel like an asshole!’ At the same time, it was freeing to create something that was hers at a time when she was so linked with J Crew that ‘I almost didn’t know what was my own. People used to call me Jenna Crew, which is hilarious.’ It was also the first time in her life that she had ‘the time and the finances’ to do everything she wanted with a renovation.

She is stepping into another new era now: season two of RHONY is not confirmed but seems likely; she has been in a new relationship with the photographer Cass Bird since at least the summer, having spoken – albeit briefly and obliquely – about a break-up on camera during RHONY. Recently, she posted a romantic black and white photo with Bird on Instagram; Lyons wore a giant gobstopper diamond ring; congratulatory comments flooded in from followers. So, is she engaged? Well, she says, ‘It was… I think it was confusing. I don’t think we realised that people… I think people made assumptions. It was just us like, being cute and in bed, just like laying there, and everyone like just jumped to conclusions. We are very happy – we’ll say that,’ she says, a bit vaguely. Though there is definitely a huge ring on her engagement finger, I realise later; I ask her about the ring, just to make sure that I haven’t misunderstood, and she shrugs and smiles, almost shimmies, creating a pleasing little mystery – demonstrating that she hasn’t gone full reality-TV overshare, thank goodness, and probably never will.