Here she is at the CFDA awards, wearing a nipple-baring sheath by the designer Christian Cota; here at the New Yorkers for Children "A Fool's Fete" benefit in a chiffon ball dress with what look like crow-feather sleeves; here at the "Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's" screening and after-party in a strapless brocade fishtail gown right out of Barbie's closet; here in a plank-shouldered suit, arm in arm with the Brant brothers, the party-hopping socialites. And here she is again during New York Fashion Week, wearing a blue fur chubby and perched in the front row of designers like Zac Posen and Prabal Gurung. They are among those who increasingly court a woman now considered one of the top 10 "gets" at an event where, as Nadine Johnson, the seasoned New York publicist, says, an element of "social or hipster" is desired.
"When people say, give me the DNA of cool," Ms. Johnson said, "Michelle Harper is always on the list."
Her genuinely original and fantastical style of dressing is Ms. Harper's claim to what by any standards is an extremely provisional celebrity. Over the last five years, she has made herself so ubiquitous a subject of the photographers clustered on street corners and outside fashion-show tents that she was finally forced to reverse herself and declare "street style so over." During roughly that same period, Nicola Formichetti, creative director of Mugler and a frequent collaborator of that other arch-image manipulator, Lady Gaga, cast Ms. Harper in an Elle video series titled "The New Muse." In 2012, Vanity Fair named her to its Best Dressed List. She was in a category appropriately designated the Originals.
"She has made herself into a kind of ambulatory work of art," Amy Fine Collins, a fashion expert and Vanity Fair special correspondent, said of Ms. Harper. "With the passage of time she has pushed it a little further and further, been more experimental and at the same time extremely polished and not clownish."
Yet who is Michelle Harper? And why do so many people suddenly find themselves fascinated by a 35-year-old businesswoman and brand consultant, a former club kid who once went by the name of Cutie Pie? Is she the endpoint of the overworked Warhol dictum, living out the final seconds of her 15 minutes through a camera's lens? Is she a shrewd brand builder claiming our collective attention with madcap sartorial antics? Is she a modern-day Holly Golightly? Or is she the spiritual heir of Sylvia Miles, that notorious '70s party hound renowned for showing up anywhere someone put a potato chip on a windowsill?
"The No. 1 thing I get labeled quite often is socialite," said the woman in question. "And I'm not. I'm a hard-working girl who may be dressed and out a lot and outspoken, but I'm not in some bubble. There's no money tree shaking down on me."
She says she is a brand adviser whose nondisclosure agreements prevent her from naming her clients, though she does consult for Tata Harper, a beauty line owned by her sister-in-law. Her indifferent employment history also includes a stint at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.
On a chilly winter morning, the two of us are seated in the lobby of the Mercer Hotel. Ms. Harper's geisha-pale face is reddened at the cheeks with large rouge dots and by a slash of matte lipstick on her Kewpie doll mouth. She is dressed in what is for her a restrained manner, dark hair tucked under a vintage Thierry Mugler turban and, beneath a voluminous black Yohji Yamamoto coat, a Uniqlo Heattech turtleneck tucked into men's tuxedo trousers hemmed as shorts.
She is wearing black stockings, black Céline platforms and a pair of supersize glasses from L. A. Eyeworks that might have lent her some resemblance to Mr. Peepers were it not for the leopard-print frames. ("I love bold clothing," she said.) She is as fine-boned as a bird and so notably thin it is hardly surprising the granola she orders for breakfast — after stating "I'm starving" — goes mostly untouched. Like many New Yorkers, Michelle Harper is hungry for everything but food.
Raised alternately in Manhattan and in the coastal Colombian city of Barranquilla, where her grandfather was a noted modernist architect, Ms. Harper was no child of privilege, she said. "I didn't come from some pampered background." Sipping from a bowl of camomile tea, she added: "My parents came from nothing and started at the bottom. That is another huge misconception about me."
Her father, Henry Harper, and stepfather, Frederico Sève, are both art dealers. Her mother, after working her way up through the ranks at J. P. Morgan, founded Violy & Company, a prominent advisory firm that guides companies, many in Latin America, on growth strategies.
While the Sèves inhabit a 2,100-square-foot triplex overlooking the Museum of Natural History, the apartment in which Michelle Harper was raised was a modest one just down the street from Studio 54. "I could lie in my bunk bed and hear the music thumping through the wall," Ms. Harper said.
Her parents, as their fortunes rose, sent Ms. Harper to the private Lycée Français de New York, the private Spence School and boarding school in Switzerland; her important instruction, she said, came by way of some flamboyant characters from a nearby roller rink. They congregated in the lobby of her building, friends of a doorman who took the preteen Ms. Harper on as his sidekick. "Basically, roller disco drag queens were my nannies," Ms. Harper said. "In my building it was Halloween every day."
That influence goes a long way toward explaining an aesthetic that flouts the conventional rules of dressing, one favoring ball gowns for any occasion and emphasizing outré exuberance that stands out amid the safe conformity of so much designer dressing.
"The best thing about her is that she looks like she's living in her own world, like she's always going to the Oscars," Mauricio Padilha, a partner in the fashion public relations firm Mao PR, said.
For Mr. Posen, it was clear from the moment he met Ms. Harper that he had encountered a collaborator with the flair and drive to "conquer New York through the power of dress." At early meetings in his studio, the two plotted out an image for her that he characterized as Erté meets Helena Rubinstein. If what they were planning was a form of elegant transvestism — a woman in drag as a woman — that suited Ms. Harper's worldview and her tastes.
"Wigstock was huge for me," Ms. Harper said, referring to the annual outdoor drag festival staged on Labor Day throughout the late '80s. "Those tribes taught me a lot. They taught me that living a life for the approval of others is not something I could ever do. I'm not interested in a khaki nation. You will never see me in sweats."
You will see her instead on the town wearing platter hats or vintage capes by Cristóbal Balenciaga or a studded rabbit mask by Heather Huey or hot pants once characterized as looking like a waffle-knit diaper. "Maybe some people just see me as a crazy person," Ms. Harper added with a shrug. "I can't control that. What I can do is wake up, see something in my mind and execute it."
Although her apartment on Sullivan Street was off limits to this reporter, she once showed it to Harper's Bazaar: "Michelle's wardrobe would make any woman (and their man) weep," a writer exclaimed. "It takes up the entire exterior wall of her living room. Left to right, floor to ceiling. Most of her clothes are vintage and organized per category: coats, day dresses, evening dresses, contemporary, shoes, jewelry, all dry-cleaned, stored in boxes, wrapped in tissue paper and/or polished. And the entire thing is seasonal too! Come spring everything will be shipped to storage."
"I didn't believe it myself until I saw it," said Jenny Shimizu, the former Calvin Klein model who, since the two met last year at a party given by the model Karen Elson, has been her inseparable companion and red-carpet arm piece. "It's like so many things about her," Ms. Shimizu said. "There are these misconceptions and generalizations that don't fit this person who is full of spirit and down-to-earthiness."
Before meeting Ms. Shimizu, Ms. Harper was linked to the filmmaker Daniel Leeb, sometimes inaccurately described in print as her husband.
"We met when we were 15," Mr. Leeb recently recalled. "We were both involved in N.Y.C. night life as teenagers. She was quite popular back then. We didn't really get together until the summer of '94, when we both ended up at the Rhode Island School of Design's summer program. That's where we got to know each other. It wasn't like we became fast friends. It was more like teenagers: 'You're annoying.' 'No, you're annoying.' 'Let's hang out.' "
Since those days, Mr. Leeb has had a front-row seat on Ms. Harper's transformation into a character now a staple on the Web site of Billy Farrell and Patrick McMullan, photographic chroniclers of the night. To be captured by their lenses is thought to be a sign of arrival, never mind the destination. To be photographed repeatedly by them, in an age of fame without particular purpose, is a verified sign of success.
"There's no question the Michelle people are familiar with in the fashion world, in terms of the blogs, the magazines, Billy Farrell, Patrick McMullan, is one specific performance-artist-based Michelle," Mr. Leeb said. "The Michelle I knew and was in a relationship with for so many years, who I loved dearly, was someone who was not one-dimensional. It's questionable as to whether there's a purpose to what she's doing now that will have any positive effect."
"I saw her during Fashion Week when I hadn't seen her in months," he added. "I saw her backstage at Cushnie and Ochs and tapped her on the shoulder and said, "Hey." Three minutes later, I got a tap on the shoulder and she gave me a big hug. It was bittersweet. Then I saw her again at the Y-3 show and she was in the front row and I didn't have a seat, and after the show was over, everyone on the runway was catching up and she ignored me completely. That hurt. It was, oh, yeah, back to reality. We're not backstage at Milk. We're at Y-3."
Unlike others similarly beloved of and besotted by fashion — the brewery heiress Daphne Guinness and the stylist Anna dello Russo spring to mind — women known to change outfits many times in a day, Ms. Harper considers herself a simple sort. "Nobody believes me, but I can dress in five minutes," she said.
"Clothes are not all I am, but being expressed and happy is a very important thing for me," said a woman whose current bedside reading, she explained in an e-mail, includes the works of the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron and "The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying" by Sogyal Rinpoche.
"It's about the dream," said Ms. Harper. "I get this image in my head of what I want to wear," she added, citing a mash-up ensemble envisioned for a recent party, one involving a T-shirt tucked into a Victorian skirt with a bustle, a Burberry punk rock studded bracelet and an antique Spanish comb pinned into her topknot. "It comes to me and I execute."
It works. While it was Ms. Harper's "fine sense of line, texture and balance" that made her an easy choice for inclusion on the list of the world's best-dressed people, as Ms. Collins of Vanity Fair said, what sends her paparazzi metrics rocketing is how she reads in pictures as a beacon of authentic individual style.
"The reality is, she was made to be photographed," Ms. Collins said.
