looking like a living, breathing editorial page from Vogue Japan

Anna Dello Russo is not just any fashion editor. You can tell that as soon as she walks into a room, looking like a living, breathing editorial page from Vogue Japan, her Condé Nast powerhouse. Today, she is wearing a leopard-print Lanvin dress, Bulgari jewels and Manolo Blahnik shoes. A fairly standard fashion editor wardrobe, you might think. Except Dello Russo has affixed a pair of bowling ball-sized fibreglass cherries to her head – she also sported a gold version at the autumn/winter 2011 New York shows, with a rodeo-fringed leather coat to match. Dello Russo's train of thought is simple: "It's my first job to make myself up. I style myself like I style a model. You should put your passion on yourself before translating to other people."

Dello Russo's idiosyncrasies don't stop at clothing. How many fashion editors do you know with their own eponymous fragrance – released by yoox.com last year in a bejewelled shoe that was inspired by a Christmas-tree bauble? Actually, how many do you know with their own self-managed blog, or a retinue of staff whose email signature reads "Anna Dello Russo Factory"? It's easy to imagine Anna as a fictional character marching her Manolos through Funny Face or even Prêt-à-Porter, but this is what being a 21st-century fashion editor is all about – part celebrity, part caricature; definitely larger than life.

We've seen hints before in the deification of US Vogue's Anna Wintour and the former French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld, whose names have become known to people who never read the fashion pages, via prime-time documentaries and fictional characterisations galore. But Dello Russo is another entity entirely – creative director and fashion consultant Ronnie Cooke Newhouse described her as an "insider fashion reality star", and she's in touch with her audience 24/7. She blogs on annadellorusso.com and tweets during the shows, broadcasting her image over the internet and even across competitors' magazines (she was the lead editorial and cover-girl of last autumn's 10 magazine). The final leap, never before made by any member of the fashion press, was on to the catwalk last year, modelling for the Lanvin/H&M fashion show in New York, and for Giles Deacon's first presentation for the Parisian house of Emanuel Ungaro – a neat inversion of the set that looks and the set that is looked at in the world of fashion. Online, plugged in and turned on, she explodes the idea of the fashion editor being at least once removed from the general public. Anna Dello Russo is always ready for her close-up.