ANNA DELLO RUSSO,The New Icons of Fashion,fashion editors

The New Icons of Fashion

ANNA DELLO RUSSO lives in a glass house — the virtual kind — her subtlest gesture or sartorial quirk scrutinized by her legions of fans. Pecking at their keyboards, those online viewers wax effusive. “She is like Coco Chanel to me,” one admirer exclaimed on The Sartorialist, the popular blog. “Isn’t she fabulous ... so jolie laide,” gushed another on The Fashion Spot; a third posting on Ms. Dello Russo’s blog, to her: “I love when you wear pink.”


 They want to choose my outfit, to dress me like a doll,” said Ms. Dello Russo, the elastic-limbed editor at large for Vogue Japan. “I’m thinking I’m a Barbie of the Internet.”
Not that she is complaining. Ms. Dello Russo and her raffish style-world cohort, who populate the mastheads of the fashion magazines, represent a new breed of Web-based reality star. Cyber idols like Carine Roitfeld and Emmanuelle Alt of French Vogue, Kate Lanphear of American Elle and Giovanna Battaglia, lately of Italian Vogue, are hardly household names. But as the heroines of influential fashion blogs like Jak & Jil, Who What Wear and Citizen Couture, they are casting a spell, their comings and goings relentlessly tracked by a new generation of aspiring style savants.
“Editors and models have become the new fashion icons,” said Tommy Ton, the Toronto-based publisher of Jak & Jil, a photo blog that charts stylists’ and editors’ progress to and from the fashion tents. Their look and quirky glamour have, in fact, inspired a flurry of advertising campaigns, product introductions and fashion lines. “Even celebrities follow their lead,” Mr. Ton maintained.
They do, in fact, seem to be wielding an influence that is, ironically, poised to outstrip that of the magazines they serve. “You’ve got people interested in fashion in Middle America going to these Web sites and studying these people,” said Gregory Littley, a social media and branding consultant in New York. They are “using the blogs as a resource with which to educate themselves.
“To parts of America that aren’t exposed to Paris, New York or Milan,” Mr. Littley added, “those sites are a bible, a window on the culture that they take as gospel.”
Indeed, the widening appeal of a cluster of high-ranking stylists marks a kind of sea change. “Today, if I were to stop a young girl in the street in Stockholm and ask her, she would probably know who Carine Roitfeld is,” Jens Grede observed in Industrie, the London-based magazine that he co-edits and that caters to fashion insiders. “Five years ago she would never have known.”
Style-struck viewers might identify Ms. Roitfeld by her form-fitting dresses, dominatrix footwear or the swag of dark hair that falls over one eye and grazes her finely etched cheekbones; they could as readily pick out Ms. Dello Russo by her theatrical, straight-from-the-runway looks: big shoulders, big furs, baroque accessories and cascades of drapery; and Ms. Lanphear by her platinum boy bob, spiky jewelry and biker coat. And they might know Ms. Battaglia by her offbeat classicism — back-swept hair, creased trousers and breezy, trend-proof dresses. Would-be insiders themselves, those blogophiles already are more than glancingly acquainted with a handful of fashion stars who invade their living rooms each week by way of shows like “Project Runway.” They formed a sizable part of the audience for “The September Issue,” a film documentary that made an unlikely pop star of Grace Coddington, the creative director of American Vogue. And some can parrot the sayings of Rachel Zoe, the Hollywood superstylist who is given to breathing “I die” in broadcasts of “The Rachel Zoe Project” on the Bravo network.
Stylists who dress celebrities or direct fashion shoots and put together runway looks for prominent designers, were once fashion’s unsung worker bees. “They have been inspiring designers for years,” said Andrew Rosen, the chief executive of Theory, a fashion brand that featured a roster of prominent stylists in a recent store and Web campaign. “Now they’re inspiring consumers.”
Fashion professionals and civilians alike are drawn by the editors’ evident passion, said Ms. Lanphear, one of Jak & Jil’s most popular subjects and the heroine as well of several fan sites devoted exclusively to her racy look. “They communicate that passion by wearing runway pieces styled in new ways, in everyday situations,” she said. “That’s what’s so inspiring.” (Elle.com is capitalizing on Ms. Lanphear’s visibility by featuring her on its site, where she shares her insights with readers.)

The fashion idiosyncrasies of stylists certainly appeal to Tiffany Fung, a senior at Oberlin College in Ohio, and a devotee of blogs like Face Hunter, Lookbook and Styleclicker. The women photographed on those sites “are presenting fashion masterpieces,” Ms. Fung enthused, “and, for the most part, my job is to try and interpret their ideas for myself.” 

Maya Chayot, a communications major at the State University of New York at Purchase, routinely scans the blogs for photographs of models and stylists she admires. Those people offer a glimpse of fashion that is “more authentic and eclectic than the fashion magazines,” said Ms. Chayot, 21, one that is “more obtainable for me.”
Updated weekly, or even daily, the blogs themselves are “much more current than other mainstream media outlets,” said Mr. Littley, the branding consultant. They are providing their audiences with “an instant window to the fashion world — one they don’t read about in Us Weekly.”
Or, generally speaking, in the leading fashion publications, which have traditionally attracted readers over 30. Though some have sought to capture a younger readership, offering a smattering of cover subjects scarcely out of their teens, such efforts have gone largely ignored. Between 2000 and 2010, the median age of female readers of fashion magazines stayed fairly steady, according to GfK MRI, a media research company, climbing only slightly, from 34.2 to 35.4 at Vogue, from 40.6 to 42.6 at Harper’s Bazaar and from 32.3 to 32.6 at Elle.
But style professionals say that the fashion glossies carry little weight with women in their teens and 20s. As Mr. Grede of Industrie noted, “a substantial part of the global readership has been migrating online.”
Ms. Fung is typical. “I rarely look at Vogue or Bazaar,” she said. “But The Sartorialist is synonymous with my morning coffee. It is close to religion for me.”
Readers’ exodus to the Web has not escaped Ms. Dello Russo. Her own blog annadellorusso.com, draws, she said, some 20,000 viewers a day, most of them in their teens. “Those girls are desperately looking for wearable fashion with an interesting twist, one they do not find in magazines,” she said. Few of them read fashion bibles like Vogue, she added, since those magazines show fashion in a way that is “too abstract.” Their editors are too much concerned with “creating beautiful images,” she argued, while paying scant attention to bread-and-butter issues like “how to wear a particular jacket, dress or pants.” Magazines like Vogue and Elle provide service features on their Web sites.
Ms. Dello Russo’s popularity and flamboyant approach to dress piqued the interest of Federico Marchetti, the founder of Yoox Group, the parent of Yoox.com, the popular online boutique. Earlier this month, Mr. Marchetti invited her to market her own fragrance on Yoox. The pocket-size $25 perfume, bottled in a pocket-size gold shoe, will arrive next month, following a small collection of T-shirts with Ms. Dello Russo’s image, which sold out within hours.
They were bought, Mr. Marchetti said, because, “Anna is a celebrity in the Internet world. These days the boundaries between Hollywood celebrities and fashion insiders are increasingly blurred.”
Prominent editors like Ms. Dello Russo are also magnets to designers and mainstream American merchants, who have built marketing strategies around them. Ms. Lanphear is the sultry-looking star of a print campaign for the haute punk jewelry of her friend Eddie Borgo. Earlier this year T. J. Maxx enlisted Lucy Sykes, a British stylist, and Zoe Glassner, a senior editor at Marie Claire magazine, to appear in a series of television commercials. Featuring fashion insiders adds a layer of credibility, said a T. J. Maxx spokeswoman. “It elevates us as a brand.”
Last spring Mr. Rosen of Theory showcased outfits that were assembled by marquee-name stylists like Andrea Lieberman, Annabel Tollman and Isabel Dupré in Theory stores and on the company’s Web site. Though he did not provide sales figures, Mr. Rosen attributed a subsequent uptick in business at Theory stores, in part, to the campaign.
Inspired perhaps by J. Crew, whose Web pages and catalogs feature ensembles put together by Jenna Lyons, the company’s president and creative director, Web sites like fashiontoast and SHE Boutique now routinely promote their in-house stylists, who chatter on the Web about their personal picks for the season. A handful of magazines have followed suit.
In a departure for a publication that focuses on film stars, In Style has introduced “Shop Like a Fashion Editor,” a four-part feature highlighting its editors and their fashion choices. The series has been successful enough to return in the spring, said Ariel Foxman, In Style’s editor. Readers now are “inundated with fashion information,” he said. “They want an expert voice, a real authority, a role model they can relate to.”
Studying the style picks of experienced editors is like “peering into somebody’s diary,” Mr. Foxman added. “That kind of access is rare. But it’s what people are craving now.”