Rosie Kinchen
She wears head-to-toe Chanel, sits on the front row at Burberry fashion shows and travels everywhere by private jet. Welcome to the understated world of Elena Perminova, Russian model, oligarch’s wife and the woman taking Instagram by storm.
As an exhibition of Instagram photographs was showcased at the National Portrait Gallery, the 26-year-old, who is married to Alexander Lebedev, the Russian newspaper baron, was busy showing how to do London fashion week in style to her devoted 201,000 followers.
Perminova is an established member of the Russian fashion pack alongside her fellow “Tsarinas", Miroslava Duma, the fashion blogger, and Ulyana Sergeenko, the haute couture designer. She is adored by other style bloggers and courted by top-end designers.
The woman who is collecting followers at a rate of 2,000 a week has found her own particular niche when it comes to photographic self-promotion. The pictures she posts regularly on the photo-sharing site are the equivalent of what would have happened if Marie Antoinette had been let loose on Instagram.
In one Perminova bronzes her peachy rear on a bright pink lilo in the tiniest sliver of a thong, in another she glides through the muddy British countryside not in a pair of wellington boots but in a canary-yellow ballgown with a 5ft train. In another she plays with her son on the gravel, dressed in a red silk evening gown and grasping some gigantic matching balloons.
There is a fabulous image of her on a shoot resting against a stuffed ostrich and pictures of her lazing on yachts in the Côte d’Azur, draped alongside sports cars and posing in front of a gigantic billboard of herself.
This is Through the Keyhole on acid. I find myself fantasising about what we will see next: a castle made from gold or a diamond replica of her own face? It is opulent and it is highly addictive. Her followers seem to agree, all eagerly “liking" pictures of her bottom and posting comments such as “I love your hair" and “obsessed with your trench coat".
What makes Perminova’s Instagram feed even more wonderful is the Slavic seriousness of it. Not only does she display a delightful lack of self-awareness but she has also perfected the anti-selfie. Not for her an arm in the way or an accidental close-up of one eye, each picture is so artfully staged and well shot that it looks as if she may have hired someone to follow her around specifically for the purpose.
In some ways it is unsurprising that Perminova takes frivolity so seriously because she has come a very long way. If I were pitching her life story as film I would say it was what would happen if the Russian mafia remade Cinderella. She was arrested for distributing ecstasy in a nightclub in Siberia when she was 16. She helped the police to arrest local drug barons but was still facing a prison sentence. Her family appealed to Lebedev, who was an MP at the time. He saved her, married her and they now have two children together.
She has a successful modelling career and is becoming a big player in the fashion world. Style bloggers have an increasingly powerful role to play in fashion as people rush to imitate them and designers try to woo them. With a couple of hundred thousand people watching her every move,Perminova isn’t just a pretty face enjoying the limelight.
