Invites to the shows – notoriously hard to come by unless you’re a celebrity, member of the press or retail executive – appear in her inbox regularly. It wasn’t always this way.

This January Xie scored tickets to some of the hottest shows on the couture calendar – such as Dior – and darlings of couture cognoscenti, including Giambattista Valli and Schiaparelli.

“I don’t consider myself an influencer,” she says. “I guess everyone is these days. That title is very broad. But ultimately, I want to come up with something, a business of some sort, that has to do with fashion.”

It was the heiress status that secured Xie a spot in an unscripted show, The Bling Empire, which is reportedly in production for Netflix.

“When [the producers] approached me about it, I didn’t know exactly what would happen. We filmed every day, four or five days a week. It’s unscripted, but they did arrange scenes, telling us what we needed to do. It was kind of set up. The way they edit things – you can’t control it. I just don’t want to come off as snobby or whatever.”

She is currently working with an agency in Milan and a PR firm, who are helping to open doors, making introductions and increasing her visibility; she has just under 150,000 Instagram followers, and has suspended her YouTube channel until she has a clearer focus for it; unboxing videos, she says, just don’t cut it for her any more.

“In the beginning, I didn’t know what I was doing,” she says. “I didn’t know anything about this industry. I was trying to figure it out on my own. You need people to guide you a little bit.”

Her glitzy life today is markedly different from that as a teenager, when she spent her Saturdays at the stables, taking care of her horses (her family owned five), and competing as an equestrian. One of her friends on the equine circuit was Eve Jobs, youngest daughter of Steve Jobs. As a teenager, she was so focused on horse riding that she stopped attending regular school and signed up for Stanford’s online high school, so she could continue to travel and compete.

In her earlier school years, she had to wear a uniform, but once a month or so, the school had a free fashion day. “I went all out on those days,” she says. “It was the only time I could really show how much I loved fashion.”

She would traipse through the halls of her school in sequinned Uggs, paired with her favourite staples from Abercrombie & Fitch or Hollister. She confesses to being the only person in her family to have an eye for fashion.

“My mom thinks that I got the fashion gene from her father, who used to make men’s suits back in Taiwan. She says that’s where I got my eye and taste. Her friends used to ask her if she was the one introducing all these brands to me. But I was discovering them on my own.”

Eventually, she says, “it hit me. I’d been racing horses for so long but I still couldn’t see it as a career. I liked shopping and fashion. I wanted to focus on that”.

She got into fashion school FIDM (Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising) in Los Angeles, but after a year decided it wasn’t for her, so she quit and started her life as a taste maker.

Xie has no delusions about just how far she has been able to make it as a consequence of her family’s largesse. Although she has landed some brand collaboration and endorsement deals, where she is paid for posting about or wearing certain designers, she concedes that it’s her father’s money that keeps the machine working; the international travel, luxury hotel stays, extraordinary wardrobe.

When she tried to explain to her parents what she wanted to do with her life, they didn’t understand what she was talking about.

“Dad didn’t know what this career was,” she says. “He grew up traditional, went to college, did his master’s, worked really hard to build his business. And here I am, leaving school to work in fashion. My parents aren’t on Instagram. They didn’t know what it was. I had to send them articles to explain it.”

They were sceptical, she says, but also confident that the work ethic they drilled into their children – piano lessons, learning Chinese – would pay off; one of Xie’s brothers is now studying psychology at Stanford. However, her parents are now fully on board – although Xie says they have advised her that any income she makes be put back into her business – and not frittered away on the latest designer must-have.

“I’m fortunate that my family can support it,” she says. “I know, in the beginning, people were wondering, ‘you’re so young, you go to all these things’. And you don’t make that much money when you start. So I never told anyone who my father was. I didn’t want it known that I was the daughter of a billionaire. I wanted to be known as myself.”

She’s meticulous about branding, having turned down sponsorship deals for hair growth vitamins, teeth whitening devices and mattresses. “They’re not my brand,” she says. “I’m not going to post about them just because I’m being paid for it.” Instead, she’s waiting for the right opportunity, and reckons that being seen at the best parties is a step in the right direction.

“The end game is – I love going to events, but I want there to be something else,” she says. “There’s no substance behind just standing around and talking to people.”

She found a perfect spot to pose, relaxed against a low table behind the bar, a stack of glasses near her, like she was out with friends for the night. She moved through the crowd, happy to talk to anyone, and it seemed for a moment that the wish she’d expressed earlier in the day was not too far from reality.

“I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing right now, especially with leaving college, without my family’s support,” she said. “But the goal is, one day, I won’t need it any more.”