My Look, My Ego, My Brand

And you won’t need a field guide to pick out professional show-offs like André Leon Talley, descending on the catwalks with a great sweep of his stole; or the fashion scribe Lynn Yeager tricked out like a Kewpie, all cupid’s-bow lips, voluminous skirts and coin-dot spots of rouge on her cheeks; or, in their midst, Anna Wintour, Vogue’s vixenish chieftain, ducking, as the house lights fade, behind precision-sheared bangs and dark glasses.

Members of fashion’s old guard, each has mastered the art of visual self-branding, marketers’ pet coinage for the cultivation of a personal style as quirky, distinctive and easy to read as a box of Cheerios on a grocer’s shelf.

“The front row of any show in any city is a billboard,” said Tom Julian, a branding consultant and director of strategic business development for the Doneger Group, a trend forecasting firm in New York. If such prominent placement once functioned as a showcase for outsize personalities — fashion originals like the fastidiously lacquered Diana Vreeland or the much mythologized Carrie Donovan, flaunting spectacles the size of television screens — it has lately morphed, in Mr. Julian’s view, into a platform on which stylists, music and film and reality-TV personalities and assorted hangers-on can strut their maverick style.

“These people are creating alter egos,” said Ed Burstell, the managing director of the fashion emporium Liberty of London.

More like avatars, really, second selves fashioned purely for public consumption. Seemingly they are manifesting an innate and highly curated sense of style. But watch, Mr. Burstell said. “They go over their look with military precision, especially during Fashion Week.”

Who can fault them if they embrace the occasion as a continuous photo op? An era with video streaming, Instagram, Tumblr and Vine has only redoubled the impact of an exotically eye-catching look, providing the chance to raise a lackluster profile and even, in the case of the lucky few, to foster a fledgling career.

Small wonder, then, that thriving alongside confirmed eccentrics is a new breed of self-promoters: editors, stylists and bloggers fanning out their plumage in the hope, it would seem, that a bit of canny self-packaging will secure them a place in fashion’s front ranks.

“Fashion’s one big game of status where recognition is everything,” said Daniel Saynt, a founder of Socialyte, a year-old agency that negotiates deals between tastemakers and brands. Having a recognizable image seals the impression that you may be worth talking to, or talking about, Mr. Saynt said, “even if nobody actually knows who you are.”

For every Jenna Lyons, the studiedly geeky executive creative director of J. Crew, a modern-day peacock has alighted: young, consummately Web savvy and unabashedly ambitious.

“These people have found footing in the industry by making a bold statement,” Mr. Saynt said, a case in point being the model Alice Dellal, whose half-razed hair has made her a standout in a forest of competitors.

There is, as well, a handful of bloggers like Susie Lau of Style Bubble, instantly identifiable by her high-contrast color and print combinations and her pert topknot, and the blogging superstar Leandra Medine, whose sassy mélange of high-crown fur hats and football jerseys, harem pants and clogs is the visual extension of her wryly irreverent posts on Man Repeller.

It’s not by chance that Ms. Medine has secured coveted front-row seats at shows like Phillip Lim, Thakoon and Reed Krakoff. The industry, she wrote on her blog this week, “has made room for amateur groupies to carve out their own stud-laden paths.” Her own style is not so much a bid for attention as the untrammeled expression of her personality, she said in an interview.