The fashion world has a new darling. She’s a size 4, counts Queen Elizabeth I and Marie Antoinette as her style icons and has “a flat stomach, great legs and curvy hips,” according to Vogue.

She also happens to have perpetrated one of the greatest leaks of classified government material in American history. But that’s not the primary concern of the breathless media coverage afforded Chelsea Manning, born Bradley.

Ms. Manning is the subject of a reverent profile and Annie Leibovitz photo spread in the September issue of Vogue, the magazine’s most important edition. The author, Nathan Heller, portrays the “graceful, blue-eyed” and unapologetic former Army private traipsing across Manhattan in a Gabriela Hearst dress and Dr. Martens, dispensing fashion tips like state secrets. (“I’ve been a huge fan of Marc Jacobs for many, many years,” she says. “He captures a kind of simplicity and a kind of beauty that I like — projecting strength through femininity.”) In a separate feature, the magazine took Ms. Manning vintage shopping as she assembled her “femme Johnny Cash” look. Not since Vogue published a piece about the wife of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, “The Rose in the Desert,” for which it subsequently apologized and scrubbed from its website, has it celebrated such a morally compromised figure.

Anna Wintour’s glossy isn’t the only fashion outlet fascinated with Ms. Manning’s transition from soldier to advocate and from male to female. “I choose my lipstick colors carefully,” she says in an exclusive for Yahoo Beauty. “I’m not just saying, ‘I like this edgy color.’ This is an expression of my humanity. And beauty, to me, is self-expression.” On Instagram, Ms. Manning certainly expresses herself emphatically, posing with her boot stomping the camera and promising to “defend against fascism by any means necessary,” the violence-endorsing slogan of the antifa movement.