LONDON — Fashion is full of superstitious souls.
Gabrielle Chanel favored the number five; for Karl Lagerfeld it was seven and for Riccardo Tisci it’s 17.
Alice Bell, a New York-based astrologer, was once involved in fashion too. She obtained her Master of Arts degree in fashion journalism at University of the Arts London in 2016 and interned at The Times of London, WWD and British Vogue before landing a job at Vogue U.S. as a fashion market assistant and executive assistant to the former digital creative director, Sally Singer.
“[Fashion] wasn’t speaking to me as my long-term career anymore, so I started astrology as a distraction,” Bell told WWD in an interview while on her book tour for “Trust Your Timing.”
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“I wasn’t interested in spirituality and astrology. Before that I didn’t know of any professional astrologers. I’d never gone to someone to get a reading. I didn’t know that was a career path until 10 months of just studying astrology intensely every day that I thought about it,” she added.
Bell had picked up a considerable amount of Instagram followers while at Vogue; she started charging people $15 to $20 for birth chart readings as a form of practice, which quickly escalated to 100 bookings a day, which became a turning point —it was “financially supporting me more than my minimum wage fashion assistant job.”
In February 2019, she quit her job and set up her website, and through present day there’s still a waiting list for a reading from her.
Bell’s debut book with Penguin U.K. started off as an encyclopedia to astrology from family, careers, health and love, but “it became too much,” so she returned to what she had always been interested in when it came to astrology: love and relationships.
“I was single for so long in my 20s, from 22 to 28, just like a disaster. That was what I’d done the most research on and all of my clients wanted to know when they were going to meet someone,” said Bell, who had cross-examined the patterns of when people had gotten into relationships and gone through breakups.
She started getting into predictive astrology in 2019 to find answers to when she was going to get into a relationship. Her readings suggested 2021, which was during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Bell admits to having some doubts because there was no indoor dining in New York and the dating app Hinge was showing up with “error, not loading.”
Out of chance, one of her Instagram followers messaged her saying she had a friend that she would love to set Bell up with.
The follower said, “would you be open to meeting him? I think you’d really get along. Here’s his birth time.”
Bell gathered from his birthday and birth time that he was a “Scorpio moon, Sagittarius rising and Tauraus sun. I love all that energy and I kept an open mind on the date.”
The couple got engaged this spring.
She had her inklings about the engagement, but was taken by surprise when her fiancé proposed on his birthday weekend.
“I always know the timing is coming, but then when it gets there, I start to panic. I’m like, “is it actually going to happen?” said Bell.
“Trust Your Timing” breaks down chapter by chapter the complexities of astrology, from what one’s birth chart means through the lens of relationships, practicing predictive astrology, personality patterns, as well as the basics of reading a birth chart and understanding what each of the planets and elements mean.
When analyzing a birth chart report, Bell suggests looking at the moon, Venus and Mars for relationships, as well as the seventh, fifth and eighth house, which are related to romance, sex and committed partnerships. They all have different meanings, but overall they’re focused on relationships.
For careers, she said the second, sixth and tenth house in a birth chart report are key, plus where the midheaven angle is, and where Saturn sits in the chart shows “where someone might put a lot of effort and work into.”
“It’s not just one specific spot. It’s a ton of moving parts that you’re looking at all together,” said Bell.
This summer Mercury, the planet of communications, will be going into retrograde from Aug. 23 to Sept. 15, which happens three times a year.
“It’s the universe basically asking you to slow down for a second and reflect on your next steps. Maybe revisit things you’ve brushed off before or if there’s a conversation you’ve been avoiding; anything in terms of communication tends to get very intensified and can feel confusing or frustrating,” said Bell.
“That’s often why you hear from people from the past, like exes, because people are more apt to reflect on the past at that time,” she added.
Another planet going into retrograde soon is Venus, from July 22 to Sept. 3. This retrograde period lasts for 40 days and is a bit more rare, as it happens every year and a half.
“How are you going about relationships? How can you change certain dating patterns? How can you effectively relate to people in your life? That can be platonic relationships too, but again, it has that element of hearing from people from the past, reconnecting with old friends and exes,” Bell explained.
She currently writes a weekly horoscope column for British Vogue and every month she sends out an in-depth monthly horoscope on Substack.
Over the next few decades, Bell sees astrology becoming part of university curriculums just like philosophy, as the subject is already such a big part of English literature.
In “Romeo and Juliet,” William Shakespeare writes, “turn him into stars and form a constellation in his image. His face will make the heavens so beautiful that the world will fall in love with the night and forget about the garish sun.”
“Astrology is so much more useful [than philosophy]. I would love to be a professor,” Bell said half-jokingly.
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