The first video pinned to Francesca Keller’s TikTok page features the 27-year-old walking through SoHo during Fashion Week in February with a scarf wrapped around her head. “I’m incognito because I growled at Anna Wintour this morning,” she said of the look before cutting to a clip of the incident. This could be written off as a blatant attempt at virality during the industry’s busiest time, but not in Ms. Keller’s case, as Ms. Wintour happens to be her mother’s former boss.
Over the course of the year, Ms. Keller has introduced her sizable TikTok audience to her Fashion Mom, the stylist Elissa Santisi, who has become a recurring, and endearing, character in her daughter’s content. Known for her work at Vogue — she was the style director from 1998 to 2003 and an editor at large until 2013 — and two stints at Harper’s Bazaar, Ms. Santisi has become, improbably, an accidental influencer.
For decades, Ms. Santisi avoided a public-facing career, though some of Ms. Keller’s followers recognize the Fashion Mom from her scenes in the 2009 R.J. Cutler documentary, “The September Issue.” (“We don’t talk about this,” Ms. Keller said of the film, which makes her mother squeamish. She still has not watched it.)
Ms. Keller is a born performer, a trait that was not inherited from her mother. Because Ms. Santisi doesn’t like the spotlight, Ms. Keller sneakily started turning the camera on her last year to delightful effect, especially for fans of the golden age of fashion magazines who are familiar with its key players.
“It’s like a two-minute reality show that I didn’t sign up for,” Ms. Santisi said of the TikToks. One of their earliest videos, which has amassed almost two million views, features Ms. Keller tagging along with Ms. Santisi on a shopping excursion, where she leaves multiple department stores empty-handed, turning her sharp editorial eye on the retailers’ “bad selection.”
“Only thing she likes is a plain white T-shirt from The Row,” the caption reads. “Zero items up to her standard.”
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