NYT: The New Icons of Fashion

“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.”

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“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.

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“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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

“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.”