Imagine Kendall Jenner crossed with Emily Ratajkowski, and you get the idea: not just gorgeous, but with a specific aesthetic that is millennial catnip. But she doesn’t look like a journalist at all, not just because the sweater is a fancy one that Julien sent over this morning for her to wear to the show, but because she is 22 and, like most of the new wave of influencers, absurdly beautiful. She has come dressed as a journalist, in jeans and a black sweater, with her hair in a bun. I meet with Doina in a Pret near London Wall, around the corner from the Julien Macdonald show. It takes up a lot of mental space, being dressed like this. The outfit feels cumbersome, both literally (I can’t get the belt to sit right, and I’m terrified of tripping over the hem of the jeans) and figuratively. So my first outfit is a new-season Gucci logo T-shirt, Mih wide-legged, floor-sweeping jeans, a checked Simone Rocha jacket with puffy sleeves, to which I have added my own black Nicholas Kirkwood shoes and a cherry-red Alexander McQueen bag that is many years old. The goalposts have shifted over the past decade, as fashion week has become a more public event – but still. Black trousers and a navy jumper is fine. The unspoken fashion editor dress code is low-key. Julien Macdonald is interviewed by Doina Ciobanu. Doina’s job is to provide online content, mostly self-portraits with fairly brief captions, some of which are arranged in collaboration with labels whose clothes or beauty products she wears in the photos. Writing to deadline frames my days and everything else – designer interviews, checking out up-and-comers, analysing emerging trends – has to fit around that. For Saturday at London Fashion Week, I will do her job and she will do mine. She moved to Bucharest at 19, and now lives in London. Ciobanu grew up in the former Soviet republic of Moldova, where she began blogging aged 16. Doina Ciobanu is 22, has 225,000 followers on Instagram (at time of writing), and attends shows as a model, VIP guest and brand ambassador. So, to find out who’s right, I have arranged a job swap at London fashion week. (“Get back to your Werther’s Originals,” was a particularly choice comeback.) We think they are airheads they think we are fogeys. The influencers hit back, branding their Vogue attackers as haughty and out of touch. Last autumn, American Vogue staffers branded the influencers “pathetic”, describing the job as “turning up, looking ridiculous, posing, twitching in your seat as you check your social media feeds”. Between the two blocs – editors on the one hand, “influencers” on the other – there is little love lost. Montagues and Capulets, in bare legs rather than doublet and hose.
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