Has the mystique been driven out of fashion?

It’s a question on the minds of many after the six-week slog of runway shows in New York, London, Milan, and Paris, which started just after Labor Day and ended only last Thursday.

For as long as almost anyone in the business can recall, top-name designers cultivated an aura of elusiveness. From Cristóbal Balenciaga to Yves Saint Laurent, Rei Kawakubo to Martin Margiela, practically every legendary designer made a sales pitch—you might even call it a gimmick—by being somehow out of reach.

Luxury-goods companies such as Hermès seemed to market their $7,000 bags through waiting lists, the idea being that, if you couldn’t have one immediately, it made it even more desirable. The appeal of haute couture was partly that it was fit to your body, but also that it was prohibitively expensive and required an appointment. It was as if fashion, like Studio 54, took place behind a velvet rope, and keeping people out was a central part of what kept them clamoring to get in.

A designer like Valentino once would have been the exemplar of this type of exclusivity. “He never gave up anything,” said Vanity Fair contributing editor and filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer. “The idea was that you keep some part of yourself private, and that’s the selling point, that’s the mystery and allure.”

Yet there Valentino was last spring, giving interviews to anyone and everyone after providing Tyrnauer with an all-access pass to film the documentary Valentino: The Last Emperor.

What caused the designer to change his tune?

Partly, he was retiring and wanted some sort of record. But Valentino also seemed to acknowledge in recent years that the world was changing. As he said to WWD: “Glamour is what has sold clothes—it does not sell them anymore.”

And he isn’t the only one who’s embracing the age of sharing. Anna Wintour has just appeared in The September Issue, a movie that shows her critiquing the celebrities in her issue, exerting her influence over designers, and laying bare the tension between the editor in chief and her creative director, Grace Coddington. It’s also a film that has already done $3 million, which is pretty good for a documentary.

On Bravo’s The Rachel Zoe Project, the well-known celebrity stylist turns up her nose at clothes sent to her by designers like Giorgio Armani, who hope her famous clients will wear them.

Marc Jacobs, meanwhile, has invited reporters to work out with him and appeared in his own documentary for Louis Vuitton, which showcased the grueling (and often painfully boring) process of putting together a designer collection. “It is what it is,” he said, when asked whether the avalanche of media surrounding fashion was driving the mystique from it. “Life changes, and the Internet and the media have been a big part of the change that exists now.”

In other words—yes, there is less mystery. Get used to it.

There’s even some evidence the actual aesthetic of the fashion world is changing to fit this warts-and-all era. Two of the business’ most in-demand photographers, Terry Richardson and Juergen Teller, not only have exposed their own bodies (countless times), but also championed an aesthetic that vacillates between '70s porn and reality TV. The frank exploration of sexual themes is not novel—sex goes in and out of fashion as hemlines go up and down. Rather, what’s noteworthy is that the photographs are often unflattering, highlighting wrinkles and other flaws. Capturing their subjects this way is a sly way of sending up the fashion world—the pictures lay the process bare by suggesting that much of what we’re being sold is fake, time consuming, and vulgar. We spend all this money on looking good, and still it’s not enough.

And when magazines aren’t running photos like this, they’re shooting reality shows. Five years after Project Runway helped create the impression that anyone could be a designer, publications such as Elle, Teen Vogue, and Marie Claire have all participated in unscripted cable shows (or shows that appear to be unscripted). On each of the shows these magazines have participated in, the action goes beyond the pages of the magazine and into the office, showcasing the editorial process.