Anna Dello Russo: 'I felt like a mouse, especially in front of Cindy Crawford'

Half way up the crimson carpet of Palazzo Serbelloni's marble spiral staircase last Friday afternoon, I paused to ping a catwalk Viddy to the Telegraph's fashion Twitter stream. Suddenly, from above: "Loowk! Loowk! Blumarine! Blooomareen! You are coming, no?!"

Anna Dello Russo has hundreds of thousands of online followers and ranks among the most visible figures in 21st-century fashion. Her voice is almost as recognisable as her face. She stopped, her two loftily beautiful young assistants stopped too, and we established that I was bunking off Blumarine to see Fausto Puglisi, whose presentation -"fantastic, fantastic!" - she was dashing from. For barely a microsecond, an odd, un-Anna-ish look flashed across Dello Russo's usually unclouded, green eyes. We air-kissed, ciao-ed - and as her white Borsalino hat bobbed on down the staircase I pondered that look. Perhaps it was just the light playing against her gold N°21 by Alessandro Dell'Acqua autumn/winter 2013 fireman's jacket? No. It was bemusement. Why on earth, she was almost certainly thinking, would anyone miss the next show?

Anna Dello Russo grew up a psychiatrist's daughter in Puglia, and started collecting clothes when she was eight years old. And she has been going to every fashion show she can get to since she was taken on in her twenties as a junior fashion assistant by Franca Sozzani of Vogue Italia . For years, Dello Russo was just another fashion editor, as 10-a-penny on the streets of Milan as a panini bar. Her raison d'etre was to make her glossy pages crackle with glamour, taste, and up-to-the-minute chic. She remembers shivering under a rubbish-strewn bridge one gloomy Los Angeles midwinter, trying to shoot summer swimwear, beside herself with frustration.

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She used to work every hour she could in the studio. And although she loved it - "Oh yes, I adored" - it was a frustrating gig. "Because I can tell you, to be a fashion editor is to be the slave of fashion. You have to make a lot of people feel good, to be the support of a lot of emotional characters. You are the coach of the crew, and a waitress, and a steward. The girls [models] always cancelled at the last minute, and you always had to smile. But if you love fashion, you have to pray to it."

Dello Russo's all went into those pages - but, from the sound of it, it was her self-esteem that really needed some gloss. "I felt like a mouse, always - but especially in front of someone like Cindy Crawford. Now? In a way it is like a revenge. To not feel like Cinderella before the party any more. To feel beautiful."

Anna Dello Russo: She's no wallflower... PHOTO: Getty

During fashion weeks Dello Russo is far too busy attending pre-sees, shows, re-sees, and parties - plus in between patiently posing for the scores of photographers who follow her (once, in the Tuileries gardens, I saw her being photographed by over 100 of them) - to sit down for a chat. So we met before the collections, in her Milan apartments, to discuss her transformation from backroom magazine mouse to hit-magnet, new media sensation.

It started in 2006, as the pioneers of ''streetstyle'' photography (fashion reportage, mostly shot outside the shows) first flexed their shutter fingers. One day, an American named Scott Schuman asked if he could take Anna's picture ("I thought maybe it was for porn!" she says), and she let him. As the shows went on, Schuman kept shooting, and putting the pictures on his Sartorialist blog. Others joined in, and within a year, she had become the Elvis of streetstyle, a genre-defining lightning rod whose gift for pulling off radical, sometimes ridiculous high-fashion with élan attracted a new, young audience to blogs like Schuman's.

READ: Anna Dello Russo: 'Daywear is not my thing...'

Now, she says, "I feel like I am a new media, all by myself" - and she has a point. For instead of spending her energy bedecking those pages, she bedecks herself. She profits when companies ask her to design for them - as H&M did last year - and when advertisers pay to be on her site, and when she is recruited for ad campaigns.

Russo lives in one Milan flat - and has another next door to store her clothes in. On my tour, she showed me tallboys neatly filled with footwear - "I put all the crazy shoes in this window, so I can look at them and change my mood. Plus, some are impossible to walk in" - and rooms filled with fashion pieces filed with a Dewey precision. "It's like being on a shoot," she says. "Everything needs to be open and visible so you can find it when you need it. So I can see what I need tonight."

Then, after a brief look in her unloved kitchen - "I do not cook. I am vegetarian and only eat raw food" - we talked and talked, mostly about fashion, as her dog, Cucciolina, sat on the sofa and listened. "Fashion," she said, "is a bit like yoga. You can understand the idea of it by reading a book, but to really feel it you have to do it. You have to find your look, and enjoy the feeling of fashion. People can't understand it unless they try the clothes, and feel how it changes their attitude."

On the rise of fashion's new digital audience, she says, "It is like the revenge of the invisible people. Fashion has been like an iceberg for years - only the tip of it was visible - but now all the people you couldn't see before are as easy to see as anyone. We can all be great stars."

READ: Anna Dello Russo records pop song and video to accompany her H&M collaboration

While her public life is thriving, her private one is quieter. "In terms of men," she says, "it is a disaster. Mostly, they are scared: few understand! They see me as a cartoon." But she has Cucciolina, a lovely country house in Puglia, and a charming niece who keeps an eye on her - and her clothes. These, she says, "are really my children".

If so, then Dello Russo is a hands-off mother: for once she wears something, she rarely wears it again. Her plan is to endow a foundation, and leave her clothes as a complete archive, "because looking at old fashion is like looking at geology. Its layers - strata - tell you about the times when they were made. Fashion is wonderful in this way."

READ: Anna Dello Russo: Accessories are like vitamins

On Sunday, I bumped into the Sartorialist himself. It was after Emporio Armani, and he was chasing a pair of richly textured wedges across a sleet-spattered roundabout. "Anna?" Schuman said. "The first time I shot her she was just walking into a show. She wasn't a 'someone' - she was just someone in the business. And every time I saw her she looked cool, so I kept on taking the pictures. And as I got to know her a little bit, I realised there is something very charming about a woman who is not a typical fashion icon but loves fashion, cares for it, has worked in it for years, and is totally sincere. Also, she knows it's all crazy - and she's in on the joke."

A few hours later, Russo hailed me at Missoni to deliver her reports on Milan's autumn/winter highlights. Afterwards, we air-kissed, arrivederci'd - and as I walked off, she boomed: "Loowk'a! When do you go to Paris for the shows?"

ANNA DELLO RUSSO'S MILAN HIGHLIGHTS

Dolce & Gabbana
"I love it. Diana Vreeland said that the eye has to travel and this was a real festival for the eyes - it took us on a fantastic trip to Monreale, in Sicily, one of the best places to be - and took us to the decoration of this beautiful church, like a dream."

Prada
"Prada was on another surreal level. She started with a typical aesthetic of the Italian lady, but she put everything on to an amazing level with the scenario and the staging - it was an elevation, another trip, and it reconfigured the season's feeling."

Fendi
"If you don't take risks, you never move. I know fur is a problem, a controversy. And I love animals: Cucciolina is my love. But I do love fur, too. Fendi is famous for fur, but now they are doing very modern things, reinventing it, using it like a fabric."

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