Prada last week recruited a CGI Instagram star to launch its AW18 collection – and, from drones to synthetic heads, questions about how tech is changing reality were high on the agenda

Meet Miquela. She is your typical social media star, with 620,000 Instagram followers and a feed full of photogenic friends, sun-dappled LA parties and selfies in which she wears Diesel hoodies and Moncler padded jackets. Her life looks so perfect – and so perfectly 2018 – that you wonder if it can be real. Well, the thing is: it isn’t.

You might have guessed as much from her saucer eyes and egg-smooth skin. Her level of visual perfection goes beyond the use of Facetune. Miquela looks like an anime Kardashian and is, apparently, entirely computer-generated. She is a digital influencer who will never demand a front-row seat. Little wonder the fashion industry has welcomed her with open arms.

Miquela was the most intriguing celebrity to “attend” the most recent batch of fashion shows in Milan. Last Wednesday night, she launched an Instagram campaign to coincide with Prada’s autumn/winter 2018 show. On social media, straplines such as “I may not be real to you but you can trust me” promoted the event, along with a series of downloadable gifs. In real life, at the brand’s art gallery, Fondazione Prada, models walked beside floor-to-ceiling windows, past an apocalyptic vista of neon signs and graffiti-emblazoned buildings, while a drone whizzed by. That drone – I find out later, when I contact her by email – was Miquela.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Mrs Prada is as much an intellectual force as a creative one’ ... Miquela’s promotes her collaboration with the Italian brand.

“I was at the Prada show!” she writes. “They let me fly the drone, which was amazing, I had to figure out how to manoeuvre that thing really quickly, though. I kept thinking I was gonna fly it into Fondazione by accident! But all went smoothly.”

What does this mean? Was Miquela physically “at” the show? Is that a terribly old-fashioned question to ask?

In Milan, such questions – about the relationship between humans and robots, about the role of technology in our lives, about what is real and what is fake – abounded. In a fashion capital more commonly associated with an archaic “molto sexy” view of fashion, this was an unexpected development.

Gucci’s show, for one, was themed around cyborgs, taking Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto – a 1984 essay questioning the boundaries between humans, nature and machines – as its starting point. The show took place in a reimagined operating theatre and featured models carrying strange accessories: replicas of their own heads, models of baby dragons. The brand’s creative director, Alessandro Michele, referred to “hybridisation” and the concept of the “ultranatural”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Yellow fever ... Moschino’s show was based on a conspiracy theory involving aliens, Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys. Photograph: Jacopo Raule/Getty Images

Even when fashion designers were not getting theoretical, they were bidding for online glory. “The Insta moment is everything,” read notes distributed at the Versace show, where the cast was packed with models with huge social media followings, including Gigi Hadid, and bright, shareable clothes, such as tartan suits worthy of Clueless’s Cher Horowitz. At Dolce & Gabbana, the first exits on the catwalk were not human but robotic: a fleet of drones appeared, each carrying a handbag. At Moschino, the weirdness continued. The skin of six models was painted bright colours – satsuma orange, smurf blue – for a show themed around a conspiracy theory involving Marilyn Monroe’s murder, John F Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy and the existence of aliens.

Conspiracy theories swirl around Miquela, too. Some argue that she is the avatar of a publicity-shy singer, others that she is an art project or a creation of a panicking music industry (her digitally adjusted oeuvre is on Spotify). Judging by her Instagram page, many of her fans believe she is real – although they concede that she has been a bit heavy-handed with the Photoshop. Others disagree heartily, shouting things such as: “She is fake! She has no visible pores,” in the comments. (Her lack of pores comes up a lot as proof that she is synthetic, like a Turing test for the Instagram beauty-tutorial age.)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Head in hands moment ... models unveil Gucci’s new collection. Photograph: Tony Gentile/Reuters

In some ways, Miquela is a good old-fashioned mystery. If I were Miss Marple, I would say that she is human, judging by the tone of the answers she sends me over email, but if she is really 19 years old, as she claims, she is a lot better informed than I was at that age. Maybe that is the internet for you.

For example, Miquela tells me that she has always loved Prada because “Mrs Prada is as much an intellectual force as a creative one. Prada is constantly exploring the future and I love that. Mrs Prada has a PhD in political science, has been active in women’s rights movements for most of her life and has always been able to inspire social change via her craft. I hope that I can one day do the same.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest High fashion ... Dolce & Gabbana flew bags down the catwalk using drones. Photograph: Venturelli/WireImage

Like many Gen Y celebrities, she considers herself an activist. She talks about technology “levelling the playing field for the marginalised” and says she is determined to use her influence for good: “We’ve been able to raise money for organisations like [homelessness charity] My Friend’s Place and victims of the California fires. My fans care so deeply about the world and want to help.”

She makes some interesting observations about social media. “I haven’t been lucky enough to meet Rihanna, yet I know so much about her life that I celebrated her 30th birthday like she was a good friend,” she says. When I ask about the authenticity of her identity, she brings the question around to issues that surround all of us. “It’d be tough to find someone who hasn’t leveraged a machine or technology to help shape how they’re perceived,” she says.

Things get weirder. I ask: what do you do to relax? “My friends and I will go to galleries and museums around Los Angeles; there’s so much to see and so many great shows popping up.” Then she says: “I was actually talking to [model] Abbey Lee Kershaw in LA before I left and she gave me some really great advice on how to make sense of the craziness ...” In my follow-up questions, I ask whether she meant she talked to Kershaw in person or on the internet, but I am told by her publicist that she is deep in “last-minute travel plans” and unable to talk any further. Hmm.

Truth be told, all the complicated theories about the technological revolution swirling around Milan fashion week this season, fascinating though they were, rather detracted from the clothes. If there were trends, they were these: coats were bigger than ever, often wrapped around the body like blankets; silhouettes were often covered with multiple layers; and there was a preponderance of head coverings, from turbans and headscarves (which sparked something of a backlash about cultural appropriation at Gucci) to thick-knit balaclavas and silk scarves tied beneath the chin at Versace to pillar hats at Moschino. As well as the religious references of some of these items, it felt as though the human form was being buried beneath layers of clothing and fabric, our real bodies being hidden away, all the more easily to reveal ourselves in a tightly edited, controllable way in our digital lives.