She＇s the Internet＇s Most Polarizing Fashion Influencer—and She Knows It－By Chavie Lieber,WSJ

Of all the times Danielle Bernstein has enraged the internet—and there have been many—the engagement party might take the cake.

Last October, the New York fashion influencer threw a wedding-sized gathering at a historic estate in Yonkers, wearing an aisle-ready couture gown. There was a lavish cocktail hour, a live band and an outfit change, all photographed for public consumption. Ahead of the party, Bernstein posted links for dress-code-approved guest attire on social media, which would earn her commission if people hit the buy button. Brands provided free dresses and shoes for the event with the expectation that she would credit them.

From the vantage of the Instagram feed, this celebration of love and commitment looked more like a business opportunity. It didn’t help that her speech sounded eerily similar to the remarks another bride had posted on TikTok. When Bernstein’s engagement ended publicly a few months later, cynics swarmed online forums suggesting that there had been a dispute with her fiancé over a prenuptial agreement, which Bernstein denies. She says the relationship ended amicably.

The 34-year-old now looks back on this time as an “aha” moment. “I opened the door and got upset when they walked too far in,” she says. “Not everything in my personal life needs to be a content moment.”

In the 15 years Bernstein has been blogging about fashion, she has been both the saleswoman and the product. Her business model is simple: She wears clothes, people buy them and she makes money from it. She says she earned $2.8 million in 2025 just from brand deals and shopping commissions.

But her success has invited scrutiny. Because she has been accused of stealing designs for the clothing brand she founded in 2019; because she’s edited pictures on Instagram to make herself look skinnier; and because she is rich, beautiful and refuses to be canceled, online critics have made a sport of tracking her every misstep. “Snark pages,” the corners of Reddit where people trade gossip about online stars, were practically invented for Bernstein. Tabloids have called her “America’s most hated influencer.”

“I don’t want my kids to Google me one day and see these headlines,” Bernstein says. “I don’t want that to be my legacy.”

And so, she says she’s embarking on a reset. This month her fashion label, WeWoreWhat, is rebranding under a new licensing partner, with plans to introduce higher pricing, more premium materials and explicit messaging about how it gathers inspiration from luxury and vintage fashion.

“I think of us as comparable to Zara, Mango, Steve Madden,” she says. “We are taking trends, runway and vintage inspiration, and making it accessible.”

In an upcoming Substack essay, Bernstein plans to address the copying accusations that have dogged her brand and apologize for past errors. Some designs, she now says, “should have never made it through the process.”

Bernstein is sitting at the kitchen table of her Tribeca penthouse she recently renovated that’s filled with custom tan and white furniture and French antiques. The influencer is toned, tall and lean, and though she speaks with confidence, there’s a skittishness apparent in the way she shifts in her chair and fiddles with her gold anklets.

A rebrand might seem like a convenient time to wash her hands of past controversies. But Bernstein says she’s “grown up a lot” recently.

“I know I made mistakes,” she says. “It’s part of my story. I’m not a victim of it. I was responsible for a lot of it. And I’d love to move past it.”

Today there are millions of people who call themselves content creators, but Bernstein was a pioneer of the industry when she started her street style blog in 2011 as a Fashion Institute of Technology student from wealthy Great Neck, N.Y. By 2015, Bernstein was charging $15,000 for each piece of sponsored content and working with brands like Lancôme and Virgin Hotels. These days, brands pay as much as $250,000 a year to work with her.

Such fees are reserved for people who can actually move product—and business owners say that few can hawk like Bernstein. During an interview for this article, she manages to plug both a hair-growth supplement (Wellbel; she’s an adviser) and a pair of WeWoreWhat jeans that she says are nearly identical to Hailey Bieber’s Gap ones.

“Her returns have always been really crazy,” said Siffat Haider, co-founder of supplements company Arrae. Haider says her brand pays Bernstein about $10,000 for a series of Instagram Stories and that Bernstein typically brings in double that fee in sales. “In terms of durability, I’ve never seen anyone like her.”

“I look at her account, see a great outfit and then put it together,” said Ashley Bard, a WeWoreWhat shopper from Rhode Island.

Bard, 40, has read stories about Bernstein copying designers. “It’s fashion and there’s so many looks out there, and sometimes that stuff happens,” she said. “I would hate to learn if it’s intentional, but it doesn’t seem to be.”

Most of her disputes with designers have played out on social media. But in 2020, Bernstein and WeWoreWhat got into a legal fight with lingerie brand the Great Eros over accusations that WeWoreWhat had copied the brand’s signature print of line drawings featuring female bodies. The Great Eros dismissed its claims in a confidential settlement in 2022; Christina Viviani, co-founder of the Great Eros, declined to comment.

Bernstein won’t comment on specific allegations of copying. “When people said our designs came too close to theirs, instead of listening I was defensive and reacting,” she says. “We should have been more careful.”

Late last year Bernstein bought her licensing partner Onia’s stake in WeWoreWhat and now owns a majority of the company. She declined to share its annual revenue, but said it is growing. In 2023, she told Business of Fashion that the company made $30 million the previous year.

WeWoreWhat is now “mindful about not taking inspiration from other small designers,” she says. Instead, it draws from luxury brands “like Khaite and Chloé and the Row”—a practice she doesn’t see a problem with. “Reinterpretations and inspiration from runway and trends is something that tons of brands do every single day.”

Bernstein says she “used to Photoshop my photos like crazy,” to take her from a size 6 to a size 2. “I was so insecure about my body and the way I looked. Now I smooth out a vein, but I’m not morphing my body. That’s been a journey.”

She continues to post—about her workouts, her shopping trips, her under-eye surgery —but is sharing less of her private life. Redditors are already feverishly discussing her new boyfriend. She won’t comment on the matter, merely offering with a smile that she’s “really happy.”

Bernstein now shares her experience, good and bad, with fellow influencers she mentors.

“If I was in jail and had one person to call, it would be Danielle,” said Christina Elezaj, a New York influencer.

Bernstein regrets putting her engagement under a spotlight but wants to be clear about the speech she gave: “Those were my own words,” she says, “but after so many years of scrutiny, even a simple speech thanking the people I loved became another internet pile-on.”

She says her Substack has nearly 18,000 subscribers. She’s been using AI “for ideating and coming up with structures,” but “writing it myself,” she says.