I walk past a hair salon on Bloor as the smell of burnt hair and Kerastase slinks out its cracked windows. Suits and orange Hermes bags, a sight I would normally slow my pace for, sidle up beside and glide by me as I stammer by, over-caffeinated and underprepared. Entering Holt Renfrew’s heavy glass double doors I notice the doorman smile at me and I feel calm… Enough to approach the La Mer counter and say,

“Hi, where can I find Erika Bearman?” The lady behind the counter gives me a look of confusion and discomfort. “Oscar PR Girl,” I clarify. Her face lights up in recognition.

“Straight up the escalator, you can’t miss her,” she says.

After following her directions I’m met with that familiar fashion gleam, chalk full of once-overs, pristine clean. Bearman wears a floor-length Oscar de la Renta heavy silk skirt in the deepest shade of purple that can only be found in late August sunsets, over-ripe plums, and leftovers long-forgotten. She pairs it with a fitted basic white T-shirt and 5-inch beige platform heels, making her tall and thin enough to look like a walking fashion illustration. Or a living Instagram shot, only better. “If we’re going to take Instagrams, let’s use an elongating, slimming filter,” she jokes. I laugh, but after seeing my own Instagrammed attempts of her and I, where I chose to employ the endearing characteristics of stout, pudgy and mildly starstruck, I support Bearman in kindly asking someone to invent one. Or three. Several different types of elongating varieties, maybe.

Remember those interviews that would rattle on saying, “She batted her long eye lashes as her wide eyes scanned the room and she took a sip of Fiji water…?” I made a promise to myself that I would never write in those types of indulgent, truth-stretching sentences, but that is what Bearman is about to make me do– she was exactly like that. She really did bat her long eyelashes so slowly and gracefully that I was left wondering how much mascara she had on. I wanted to wear that much mascara, and that exact brand. Everyone in the room appeared to share my thoughts. And Bearman, (who might be psychic) went on to say, “Anyone can do this. You can do this. If this is what you want to do, you can. You just have to be the first one in and the last one out… But it is possible.”

What exactly is the “this” Bearman spoke of? Most people know her for her social media presence, something which everyone in attendance only referred to as “social.” I did not receive this memo. Her trademark voice on social media has left both her and the Oscar de la Renta brand with hundreds of thousands of “likes” and followers. But Bearman admits that it’s early days in the world of new information as we are only just beginning to understand what’s possible in the digital world. Lofty ideas like how the internet gives everyone an opportunity to tell his or her own story were tossed around, but Bearman was careful not to tread into awkward strength of your personal brand-type chats as she concluded, “It’s about responding to wants and changes. It’s very instinctual. I never tweet anything that I wouldn’t want to see printed in a newspaper. It’s about finding the balance between giving enough that it’s interesting but not giving too much.” In a society of chronic over-sharers, this sort of simple advice is strikingly difficult to come by.

Bearman refused to overlook the power of a single tweet, embracing the changes media faces today she noted, “You used to have to wait for journalists to ask to write a story about a particular subject. Now, they can just reference a tweet with no consent. It used to be that we all relied on outside media sources, and it’s not that we don’t need outside sources, but now we are our own media.” It becomes increasingly evident that it’s not only her openness to change, but also her awareness of its power that has placed her in her influential position.

While most know Bearman as “@OscarPRGirl,” she explains that social media only constitutes about 20 per-cent of her job. She divulges some of the other facets of being @OscarPRGirl saying,  “Amy Adams came to us and said ‘I want to look like Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina‘ at this year’s Academy Awards… Of course Oscar, being Oscar, produces a photograph of him and Audrey eating spaghetti together in Palm Beach. And so Amy Adams ended up looking exactly like Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina.”

Treading lightly, she talks about John Galliano’s controversial collaboration for de la Renta’s F/W 2013 collection saying, “What you read in the newspapers is true. John came for three weeks to help put the collection together. He’s a very unique talent.”

She went on like this, perfectly poised without the shred of an ego, as I mentioned to her that we tweeted at each other a while ago and it made my day.

“What did we tweet about?” She asked.

“Oh… I uh… I don’t remember.” My mind reeled.

“I’ll remember it if you tell me.”

“No, I honestly have no idea…”

“Oh don’t worry, you’re like Oscar, he always says he has the memory of a mosquito.”

Then we posed for a few photographs and, until a slimming and elongating Instagram filter is invented, they will never see the light of day.