Calling the quick-change artists and freebie-hustlers of the collections sideshow “pathetic,” “embarrassing” and “sad,” the Vogue editors bemoaned the practice of Instagram-baiting as a herald of the death of real style.The bloggers shot back with their own critique of an industry that benefits richly from cozy relationships with designers and labels. “Bloggers who wear paid-for outfits or borrowed clothes are merely doing the more overt equivalent” of the editorial credit system,” @susiebubble, as the British blogger Susanna Lau is known, wrote to her 277,000 Twitter followers.

Bloggers, too, she added, have bills to pay.Ultimately it was a fake firestorm lit by careless terminology. The creatures that the Vogue team was talking about are not bloggers — they do not create original content, written or visual — but rather poseurs. Whatever side you came down on, however, this new reality underscores one difficulty faced by those who attend the monthlong round of fashion shows held twice yearly in New York, London, Milan and Paris: For many, attiring oneself in the morning to attract the camera is now part job description and part ruthless competitive sport.

By tradition fashion editors, retailers and stylists, though they tended to short prom dresses well, did so with anonymity in mind. It was the job of designers to put on a show. Exceptions remain, mostly among people whose names you don’t know. Tonne Goodman, the Vogue fashion director, dresses in an unvarying monochrome uniform of turtlenecks, trousers and flats. Tiziana Cardini, the fashion director of the Rinascente department store chain in Italy, dresses so quietly and well that she runs no risk of drawing attention from the more astonishing apparitions like Anna Dello Russo, an editor at large for Vogue Japan, who is known to change outfits as many as six times in a day.

If riffling through images from the recent round of European shows makes anything clear, it is that those who attend fashion shows to look and not to be looked at are, in a sense, a dying breed. In a solipsistic era each of us is a one-person brand, and fashion shows have proven a peerless platform for business enhancement.

Consider the images with this article. Selected because they were not (with the exception of Ms. Dello Russo’s) outré expressly to snare eyeballs, the get-ups would be relatively plausible in nonprofessional settings. The point, though, is not that these women look lovely, stylish and better groomed than show ponies. It is that they are short prom dress for their followers.Much as it may appear as if they are caught effortlessly darting from one show to the next, they are in fact hard at work pleasing an online audience that, in the case of the socialite Olivia Palermo, numbers 4.1 million on Instagram alone.

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