New York Fashion Week Street Style Is Often a Billboard for Brands Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times Natalie Joos said her wispy lavender dress was by Karla Spetic, an Australian designer, and acknowledged that it was lent by Ms. Spetic's showroom. PIVOTING smartly, a hand on her hip, the better to show off her pipette jeans, Laura Ellner seemed the incarnation of street style. As she posed at Lincoln Center Plaza on Day 1 of New York Fashion Week last Thursday, a brace of cameras clicked and whirred, each competing to catch her performance. And what a performance it was, as cannily staged as any red carpet promenade. But then, for Ms. Ellner, a fashion blogger, the stakes were just as high. She was hoping to burnish her image (she poses routinely on On the Racks, her style blog) and to appear on a flurry of similar sites. She was also sharing the spotlight with her bag, a roomy multizippered affair that she readily identified as a Kelsi Dagger duffel from by Pour La Victoire, the leather goods company where she works. "I always like when I'm being shot by street photographers, to call out the different pieces I'm wearing," Ms. Ellner said. As the week progressed, dozens of similar scenes were being played out all around the city in the twice-yearly outdoor style show that competes, and indeed sometimes eclipses, the action on the runways. In front of Milk Studios, on the piers along the Hudson, and at other locations where shows were staged, scores of fashion hopefuls, mostly female, mostly young, preened for the cameras, apparently vying for their 15 seconds of fame on Instagram, Tumblr or one of the dozens of fashion blogs proliferating on the Web. Was it only a couple of years ago that these showily outfitted swans - stylists, bloggers, fashion editors and style-struck students - click-clacked on the pavements, showing off a mash-up of vintage clothes, fast fashion and high-end labels in what used to be seen as a commerce-free zone? Today many of them are Web icons, trotting out their finery for scores of fans. But what they are parading as street style - once fashion's last stronghold of true indie spirit - has lately been breached, infiltrated by tides of marketers, branding consultants and public relations gurus, all intent on persuading those women to step out in their wares. "These girls are definitely billboards for the brands," said Tom Julian, a fashion branding specialist in New York City, one of a handful engaged in a particularly stealthy new form of product placement. "People still think street style is a voice of purity," Mr. Julian said. But I don't think purity exists any more. Neither for established brand nor newcomers eager to get a foot in the door. "Most young designers don't have the resources to hire high-powered PRs or have access to important editors and stylists," said Philip Oh, a street photographer, "so lending their clothes to friends and supporters who will get photographed is a great way to get noticed by both the industry and consumers." As Christine Barberich, the editor of the fashion site Refinery29, said, "more and more this is being recognized as a business." There are products to be flogged and, Ms. Barberich added, "stars to be made." Style beacons like Josephine P., as she prefers to be known, who fanned out her Champagne-toned hair and turned up at Milk Studios on Saturday in a pair of platform sandals from her employer, Nicholas Kirkwood. Or Ella Catliff, the comely young publisher of La Petite Anglaise, a style blog, who stood nearby, brandishing an Anya Hindmarch bag. It was borrowed, Ms. Catliff said, from Ms. Hindmarch's showroom in London, to promote the label during Fashion Week. Or Nicole Warne, an Australian blogger, wearing a gift from a designer friend, Alice McCall. Branding consultants estimate that popular bloggers and other so-called influencers can earn $2,000 to $10,000 for a single appearance in their wares. More typically, though, "If you give them a gift card of $1,000 and you pay their expenses, that's a good quid pro quo," Mr. Julian said. To some designers, the marketing clout of fashion bloggers can equal or surpass that of a red carpet ingénue. "We all know that there are celebrity endorsement deals,"said Karen Robinovitz, the founder and creative head of Digital Brand Architects, an agency representing fashion bloggers. On some level this is a piece of the same thing.