‘Did you win the lottery?”
That’s what Liron Amsellem’s friends asked when the 29-year-old photographer confessed to hiring a personal stylist.
As far as they were concerned, if she wasn’t hitting a red carpet, such an investment was frivolous. But Amsellem’s not-so-stylish go-to outfit — jeans, black shirt and ill-fitting blazer — told her otherwise.
“People don’t understand that if you can’t do it yourself, you need someone to help you to put outfits together,” she says.
Though Amsellem lays no claim to Mega Millions, she does have what was once reserved for the uber-rich: a fashion professional to keep her clad in the most flattering, of-the-moment apparel.
And she’s not alone. As reality shows like Bravo’s “The Rachel Zoe Project” and VH1’s “Styled by June” have propelled personal styling into the limelight — and helped make Zoe and June Ambrose celebrity arbiters of chic — more women are spending up to four figures a season to hire their very own fashion expert.
A spokesperson for Topshop says requests for its appointment-based personal shoppers have tripled in the past two years. You can even find a stylist for free at your local mall: Earlier this year, J.Crew rebranded its personal-shopping program as the more au courant-sounding “Very Personal Stylist.”
As the head of her own company, Verona’s Photography, Amsellem was in desperate need of a wardrobe revamp when she met stylist and personal shopper Valerie Halfon two years ago.
For $75 an hour, with a minimum two-hour commitment, Halfon, who launched her budget-conscious Shopping With Val business in 2010, sifts through clients’ closets to rid them of fashion atrocities, then replenishes them via trips to Bloomingdale’s, Intermix and affordable shops like Zara and H&M.
During Amsellem’s first outing with Halfon, she spent roughly $1,500 on colorful pieces and looks that could carry her through day and night, which were missing from her closet.
“We went through my clothes, and she said ‘Everything you have is black!’ ” Amsellem recalls of her initial styling session.
In an industry known for catering to the well-to-do, Halfon is somewhat of a rarity, often working with budgets that are just a few hundred dollars. “I’m usually on a budget myself,” says Halfon, “so I try to keep everything really affordable.”
“She shows me colors and patterns and accessories that I would never pick,” the Upper East Side photographer says of their seasonal outings. “When we go to the fitting room and try things on, literally every girl that passes by says, ‘That’s so cute!’ ”
Sheryl Dluginski was equally thrilled with her decision to hire Holly Getty, an 18-year fashion industry vet who sourced fabrics for J.Crew, Calvin Klein and others before starting her own styling business in 2004.
After raising three kids on Long Island, last year Dluginski and her husband moved to the Upper East Side, where she owns a small holistic fitness studio, Generations Fitness.
“I still felt like I was dressing to be a Long Island mom and not a New York City businesswoman,” she says of her first few months in the city.
“I’m embarrassed to say this, but I was shopping in Urban Outfitters, and I’m 48 years old. I knew that was a bad thing, but I didn’t know what else to do, so Holly rescued me.”
Dluginski shelled out a total of $3,600 for Getty’s fashion resuscitation ($1,500 for a four-hour in-home wardrobe consultation and $2,100 for a full day of shopping) — an investment she made with zero regrets.
Getty asked Dluginski to come up with three words — or “style points” that best described how she wanted clothes to make her feel.
“[They’re] a compass to help you shop,” Getty says. “If the clothes don’t make you feel those certain things, you don’t buy them.”
They arrived at “self-expressed, supported and effective.”
Dluginski nailed all three in pieces from Norma Kamali’s mass-market Kamali Kulture line, and what Getty calls an industry secret weapon, Escada jeans. Priced at $425 each, the two pairs Dluginski got were almost triple what she was used to spending on denim (and from a label she’d never heard of). But she was hooked at first zip.
“I’d rather have two pairs that fit me great and that I can wear in lots of situations than having four pairs that don’t fit me right.”
Elizabeth Yale, 26, was no shopping rookie when she was referred to Style Made Simple, a full-service personal-styling agency founded by Allison Berlin in 2005.
“I wore heels every single day in high school,” says Yale, who lives in Chelsea and works in television development. Though she owned an impressive selection of jeans, blazers, blouses and pumps, she found herself wearing similar variations of those four pieces every day.
“I was stuck in a bit of a rut,” Yale admits. Style Made Simple, whose customizable services range from $125 to $300 an hour, with a two-hour minimum, helped her shake things up.
“A lot of people have a vision in their head of how they want to look, but they have trouble executing it,” says Berlin, who has experience in fashion direction at Bloomingdale’s and formerly styled Stacy London for TLC’s “What Not To Wear.”
“That ultimate image that they see of themselves, we’re able to deliver.”
After a lengthy conversation with Yale that addressed her existing wardrobe, personal taste, budget and styling needs, Berlin matched her with Samantha Brown, one of Style Made Simple’s three resident stylists. Having held posts at Nylon magazine and Badgley Mischka while simultaneously running an online consignment shop, Brown understood the importance of tackling one of Yale’s other dilemmas: being strapped for time.
“[Our clients] don’t want to spend their time thinking about what to wear in the morning,” she says. “So if we can simplify that process and make it more fun and enjoyable, that’s what’s really rewarding.”
Brown and Yale started with a closet cleanup, an experience that Yale describes as “cathartic,” and resulted in stowing away pieces that she’d outgrown.
“I’m not wearing a size zero, turquoise Dolce & Gabbana cheerleading skirt anymore,” she laughs. Instead, once a season she and Brown hit stores like Barneys and Opening Ceremony for things that Yale can wear to work, cocktail parties and the many professional and philanthropic events she attends.
“You can buy a million things that you don’t know how to put together and that don’t quite convey who you want to be or who you are,” she says. “That’s how you end up wasting a ton of money or making mistakes in your wardrobe.”
Like Yale, Dluginski plans to avoid these missteps in the future.
“I actually feel like a different person once I put [my new] clothes on,” she says. “Shortly after we did the whole wardrobe thing, I was walking down the street wearing one of the new outfits, and I felt like people’s heads were turning. I thought ‘Wow! They’re looking at me!’ ”
lcooper@nypost.com