Welcome to Reality Check, a series in which we talk to the dressed-to-impress characters on reality television. Love them or hate them, they are undeniably bold lovers of fashion. They are, after all, the ones buying the most sought-after It items, fresh off the runway, and wearing them on the small screen. As for us? We’re just watching them in their world in some very head-turning clothes.
I call Christine Quinn the “queen of mean” on Selling Sunset, a show in which the leggy realtors of the Oppenheim Group, a real estate company run by Jason and Brett Oppenheim, sell luxury apartments and homes. Quinn is by far the most dynamic of the well-heeled posse, and one of the most striking. (Her poreless visage is the homepage image for the show on Netflix.) Quinn is platinum blonde and armed with a smirk that would wilt the most calculated Disney villain. And she dresses to kill. She wears stilettos with such confidence on the buffed floors of a Hollywood Hills home with three and a half bathrooms that she makes a girl want to slip on a pair of Louboutins and get her real estate license. She’s sold homes (and caused drama) in Louis Vuitton leggings with two waist-grazing pigtails sprouting from her head, Off-White blazers, and a logo-slathered lavender Balenciaga sweater. So naturally, I was desperate to find out how this made-for-TV queen bee shops.
For Quinn, her top three labels are easy. There’s Louis Vuitton. “I love everything that Virgil [Abloh] has been doing lately with the collectsions, and I think his men’s stuff is just so fantastic,” she says over the phone from Los Angeles. Then there is Balenciaga. “They’re very avant-garde and very out-there.” (One of Quinn’s standout looks is her Balenciaga logo-emblazoned cap and a silk bedtime shirt—both in a sweet hue of bubblegum pink.) And finally, Gucci. “They are definitely my number three.” While Quinn has also worn some wild card pieces, like a futuristic top from the small yet buzzy Polish label Misbhv. “It reminds me of the movie Tron, and it was very futuristic.”
And then there are the shoes. Quinn has “around” 400 of them. The heels—vertiginous, sinister, and often red-bottomed—are her most beloved collectsion. Quinn has been amassing Christian Louboutins since she was 21. “I remember being 16 years old and I was just dreaming of these Louboutins,” she says. “It was something that was just so wildly unattainable at that time,” she says. A savant in the world of Louboutins, Quinn notes that her favorites are the Daffodile 160s that boast a whopping 6.3 inch heel and a 2.4 inch platform. “Shoes really make a look. And if I’m wearing an athletic outfit, I can dress it up and feel like a million dollars, just by putting on a pair of heels or boots,” she says. “For me it’s a problem, but it’s a good problem to have.” During the day, she’ll often bring slippers and change them in between scenes. “I probably have 75 pairs of slippers,” she says. One mystery circulating the stilettos is just how can Quinn walk around in them on the brand-spankin’ new and very much rebuffed floors in those multimillion dollar homes that she is selling? For Quinn, she doesn’t pay much mind. “Oh, I don’t care about the floors. I care about my shoes more than those damn floors,” she says.
Even before Quinn had access to designer labels, she was honing her creative styling eye. “When I was a teenager, my parents couldn’t afford any clothes growing up, so I was always given my sister’s clothes. I would go and make crop tops out of sweatshirts, and I would make my clothes tighter,” she says. “Even though my clothes were from Kmart or Walmart, I was still having fun with making it look like it was always really cool and different. My style was always over-the-top in school. I would get in trouble so many times for wearing short skirts and crop tops.” As she started to make money in real estate, she began to buy more designer pieces, but it wasn’t until the show took off that she was shopping from the runway. Sometimes, those big and boisterous logos would cause an issue behind the scenes. “There were some times where production was like, ‘We don’t have clearance [to show them].’ And I’m like, ‘Sorry, actor’s choice. You’re going to have to deal with it,’” she says. “‘I’m not going to put on a Target T-shirt just because you’re worried about not getting clearance.”
Quinn stresses that she has no fashion regrets. “This is going to sound so conceited, but I really can’t look back and be like, ‘I can’t believe I wore…’ I felt like everything that I’ve worn had a purpose and a story,” she says. She isn’t a fan of the conservative route she took in the first season, but she wore it because she believed it was what people wanted to see in a real estate agent. “I guess my biggest regret was not totally being myself, and trying to worry about being taken seriously as a professional,” she says. “That was a little disheartening to go back and watch, and realize that I could have pushed the envelope a little bit more than I should have.”
When asked if she would ever switch styles with a castmate, her answer is simply: “Oh, God, no…I want to help all of them.” And she indeed did help one in particular, Davina Potratz, whom she gave a makeover in season three. “I was like, ‘Listen. This is a show. Give them a show.’ Season one was definitely a little bit more conservative, and I was helping her. I was like, ‘Here’s this Birkin. Wear this Dolce & Gabbana silk dress.’” says Quinn. “I was giving her clothes to make her feel a little bit more confident. Women feel like they need to dress a certain way, and once you get past that, the world is your oyster.”
And purchasing the Quinn aesthetic (confidence not included) may be closer than you think. “I definitely am working on a line. I wanted to start with fun, fashion-forward athleisure because of the times we’re in right now,” she says. “Then I can develop it and amp it up from there.” And there’s no doubt that we’ll be seeing Quinn’s bold creations gracing Selling Sunset in the near future. Stay tuned.
