It’s 12:54PM on a drizzly Tuesday in New York. Hari Nef, 23, has a pair of “really sparkly and gaudy” Jimmy Choo shoes stashed under her chair. She’s going to wear them to her go-see with Marc Jacobs in an hour. “He just followed me on Instagram,” she says, in a mock stage whisper.The shoes — a gift from the SAG awards two days ago — stand next to a cold-carrier from Juice Press. It will be her first NewYork FashionWeek since becoming the first trans woman to sign internationally with IMGWorldwide.

“I used to do runway for my friends,” she explains. Amongst her “friends”, count HBA’s Shayne Oliver, Adam Selman and deviant design duo Eckhaus Latta. Hari met with Jacobs’ team two and a half years ago. “When I was a child. When they had me in from Instagram. Now the prodigal daughter returns!” As if on cue, a stocky, bearded man in a black-and-red checked flannel shirt hastily lunges across the East Village cafe. “I loved you in Transparent,” he blurts out, already retreating, as if suddenly wary of the full-frontal effect of Nef ’s lily-white, pillow-lipped visage. Or maybe just aware that he has left his laptop unattended. “Thank you so much. Really!” she says, craning around so that her fleeing fan can catch the sincere, surprised smile playing across her face. She turns to me, shrugs, deadpan: “That was a plant.”

Nef is wearing an outfit she posted on Instagram seven days ago: this season’s Gucci floral-print crêpe de chine cape shirt flung open, clavicles out, grade-school tattoo choker on display. And four large animal Gucci rings from her show in Milan last week: “I have two more at home but six is just too much,” she sighs. As for permanent accessories, she has two tattoos: “Hailey” in the crook of her arm (“This is what my name would have been had I been assigned fe- male at birth”) and the chemical number of the oestrogen she injects each week.

I might not have noticed that she’d worn this outfit before, except for the fact that Vogue wrote an entire blog post about the selfie, praising her casual embrace of the “deliciously fusty wallpaper” pattern. Nef hasn’t bothered with its grosgrain tie today or the matching pantsuit that she wore with this outfit in November, rather famously posting a picture from “the women’s potty @whitehouse” to the cool 66.1k fans that follow her every move on Instagram.

I’m reminded of a diary of Miami Basel she published in Adult magazine when she was 21, and still a student at Columbia: “I felt elegant and well. I looked like a severe and special occasion… I’m gorgeous! I organise my body.” The words seem truer every day. Nef has that effortless model glow: no split ends, no visible pores, no make-up. I enjoy Nef ’s off-duty style largely because it is frequently, even obstinately, an index of her mind and mood. “I always come back to Carrie Bradshaw,”says Nef, smiling slyly. “I feel like she dressed in a way that was not occasion-appropriate, but would always comment on the occasion. She was always interpolating her point of view.” I distinctly remember when Nef wore an XXL hoodie to a Purple dinner this year. “I don’t like dressing against my mood,” she explains, laughing. She isn’t going to wear a “black dress and a fur chubby” just because she’s at a fashion dinner.