Earlier this year, an anonymous Twitter user borrowed Wintour's name to create an account, RealAnnaWintour. The account, which has racked up 760 followers and counting, appears to have been started to promote a year-old clothing company, David Lerner Collection, which produces leggings, T-shirts, and other garments.
Mixed in among RealAnnaWintour's otherwise bland tweets are dispatches such as
Go to dlcollection.com and get some leggings and tees. David who i first met 3 months ago is brilliant when it comes to making basicsand
I have been living in David Lerner leggings. Picked up a few pairs at Bergdorfs and I absolutely love them!!!!A Vogue spokesman confirms that the real Anna Wintour is not behind RealAnnaWintour, nor does she use the microblogging service in any form. (I called Vogue after seeing RealAnnaWintour mentioned on Gawker, by the way.)
More surprisingly, David Lerner, the designer behind the eponymous clothing company, insists that neither he nor any of his employees is behind the phony account.
"I have nothing, nothing, nothing to do with it," he said. "I'm barely on Twitter, and I'd never create a Twittter account to promote my business. There's no chance I or anyone I work with would do anything like that."
Lerner said he has met Wintour, "but it doesn't sound to me like she'd be saying those things, to be honest."
Whoever's behind RealAnnaWintour, it's a good bet it won't be around very long. Twitter has been known to deactivate accounts fraudulently created in celebrities' names, as my colleague Anthony Massucci recently noted. Vogue's spokesman said he had only just learned of the account but planned to contact Twitter about it shortly.
