Julia Fox Will Come for You

MILAN — From her hotel room, Julia Fox could look out the window and see Versace. This was amusing to her.

“As I just said the word ‘Versace,’ I read ‘Versace,’’’ she said, leaning back in her pebbled leather armchair, staring at the building-size billboard a mile away that marked the brand’s headquarters.

Inside this room, Ms. Fox was becoming a human-size billboard, wearing a Versace bathrobe and Versace slippers, one hand within reach of a Versace bedazzled travel cup with an attached straw (though she only really sipped on her pink disposable vape pen).

She closed her eyes, and a makeup artist named Daniel Kolaric resumed his work. While Ms. Fox sat in her cream-colored chair in her cream-colored room, he was turning her eyelids into two charcoal voids.

He circled and shaded, forming a shape far beyond the limits of what might be called, in polite society, a “smoky eye.” This dark, smudged look had become a signature of Ms. Fox’s around late January, when her attendance at a few Parisian couture fashion shows flooded social media. While posing for photos, she would heighten the effect with an alert, slightly bulging gaze. Her team called it the “Fox eye.”

Now Ms. Fox was at Milan Fashion Week, preparing to sit in the front row at Versace’s fashion show. The Italian brand had put her up in this luxury hotel, where she was booked under an alias that sounded like a name from Old Hollywood.

Though professionally an actress, Ms. Fox, 32, began playing the role of living fashion advertisement earlier this year. Between Dec. 31 and Jan. 6, she had become the new love interest and fixation of Kanye West, gradually absorbing the same kind of hypnotic and polarizing presence as Mr. West himself.

Until Valentine’s Day, when the six-week rocket of strangeness that Ms. Fox rode to international fame ended with confirmation that they’d broken up.

There are people, now, who will sigh deeply when they see Ms. Fox has given another interview. (Two were released the week that news of the breakup broke, though both were conducted before the split.) But Ms. Fox remains largely unbothered by her critics, she said, or by the caricature she has become online.

“It’s not real,” she said. “It’s only happening on the internet. I’m not actively engaging with it. I don’t feel it. I’m still 1,000 percent me. Nothing’s changed, except, I will say, having been around Kanye was like a crash course on how to be famous.”

To get the gory details out of the way: Ms. Fox said she broke up with Mr. West, but it was amicable. They had spent only about 15 days together, she estimated, when factoring in work, family and travel obligations.

“I tried my best to make it work,” she said. “I already had a jam-packed life. How do I fit this really big personality into this already full life? It just wasn’t sustainable. I lost like 15 pounds in that month.”

Were they exclusive as a couple? “I don’t think so,” she said.

Was the relationship real, or faked for publicity? “I mean, there were definitely elements of it that were real.”

What about the rumor that she had undergone interviews to be his girlfriend?…