Kardashians from Italy, the Ferragni sisters are successful on the networks and in reality

The New York Times

When Chiara Ferragni joined the board of Tod’s, an Italian luxury goods company, the company’s shares rose 12%. Ferragni, 34, has two children and 26 million Instagram followers, and is one of the most famous influencers in the fashion world, especially in Europe. Her businesses include a clothing brand and a talent agency.

Not bad for a former fashion blogger that people still call Blonde Salad sometimes. The term “blogger” has gone out of fashion. And when someone uses it now, it’s usually by mistake. What people mean by the word is “creator” or “influencer”. But all these expressions mean essentially the same thing – the difference is that they were adopted at different times in recent history.

In all three cases, we are talking about people who generate content online professionally based on their own lives: the clothes they wear, the sponsored vacation trips they take, the social engagements they attend, their passion for cryptocurrencies. Twenty years ago, this content was published on platforms like WordPress and it was difficult to quantify its reach. Now, it mainly appears on TikTok, where the indicators, which include “likes”, comments and shares, are much more accessible.

If Ferragni hadn’t started a blog in 2009, it’s possible that creators like Addison Rae, 21, a young actress with 86 million followers on TikTok (the app’s fourth most popular account) wouldn’t have been occupying front-row seats at Michael Kors’ fashion show. last month –the star-studded event of New York Fashion Week–, just a few meters away from Ferragni.

That’s because Ferragni was part of the first wave of bloggers to disrupt the fashion industry. At the time, a post by her, Brianboy, or Garance Doré could carry the same advertising weight as a full-page ad in a famous fashion magazine. When these first influencers started to attend the fashion show, it didn’t take long for them to start being accommodated in the company of the once powerful editors of the big magazines.

For a long time, the fashion elite rejected this arrangement. “People used to be snobby about anything that came out of the internet,” Ferragni said, sitting in the lobby of the Bowery Hotel, in an interview after the end of New York Fashion Week.

But that means now she too is no longer the rising rookie with something to prove. (One critic last week described her as “the mother of dragons” among influencers.) Ferragni enjoys watching TikTok videos, for example, but has yet to find her role on the app, where she attracts only a sixth of the number. of followers you have on Instagram.

“I sometimes make videos for TikTok; but I don’t always feel like myself,” she said. “It’s acceptable to say that maybe that’s not my platform. Maybe it’s not something I want to do.”

THE FAMILY BUSINESS

So how can a social media veteran protect her legacy if she’s not conquering new platforms? She follows the Calabasas game plan.

Last year, one of the most-watched original TV series in Italy was the reality show “The Ferragnez,” starring Ferragni and her husband, Fedez, an Italian rapper who proposed to her onstage in 2017. One of them, in 2018, was just as heavy as Prince Harry’s wedding to Meghan Markle, and they allowed the presence of cameras in their couples therapy sessions in the show’s first season. “It’s important not to always portray a happy, perfect life,” Ferragni said.

Other cast members of the reality show are Ferragni’s mother (a novelist who has 630,000 followers on Instagram), her father, dentist (135,000 followers), and her sisters Francesca (32 years old and 1.3 million followers) and Valentina (four million followers.)

Chiara Ferragni doesn’t see anything strange in any one of them having gained so many followers. Her followers “just love the lifestyle,” she said. “They just like you. They’re interested in everything connected to you,” which includes family and friends.

Only her younger sister followed her into the fashion world. Valentina Ferragni, 29, created a colorful line of fine, gender-neutral jewelry, launched in September 2020 and described as “easy to wear”. Her first design for Valentina Ferragni Studio was a V-shaped earring pendant called Uali, her nickname, which she defined as “a tribute to myself”.

The jewelry line has expanded to now include chokers, bracelets and rings, and all pieces incorporate the designer’s logo, a voluminous V. The company has just a few employees, always women under 30, and claims that all products are handcrafted and locally produced. The line is sold by 400 Italian jewelry stores and the Rinascente department store chain.

As is often the case between celebrity sisters, Valentina and Chiara Ferragni are very similar; both wear their hair parted in the middle, have bright blue eyes, almost always made up with bright eyeshadow, and opt for brightly colored costumes.

When she was 15 years old, Valentina Ferragni used to photograph her sister’s clothes even before the Blonde Salad blog was created, at a time when Chiara was gaining followers on Flickr, an image hosting service and social network for photography enthusiasts. Chiara posted images on Flickr as if they were a diary, as opposed to, for example, sunsets or close-ups of exotic flowers. “People hated me,” she said.

The sisters were raised in Cremona, Italy. Their mother, Marina Di Guardo, loved taking pictures and videos with the girls despite not being able to share them publicly. Di Guardo in the past worked in the Blumarine showroom, which is why his daughters were interested in fashion from an early age.

But until Ferragni’s blog took off, her younger sister’s ambition was to be an architect or interior decorator, she said. Valentina Ferragni still remembers going to her first fashion show in Milan with Chiara about seven years ago and being afraid “because I didn’t know what to do”. She was in denim overalls and a hat, and she posed for pictures with her sister, whose relaxed on camera Valentina desperately wanted to emulate.

Valentina Ferragni said that she still wants to be like Chiara, but realizes there are limitations. “For some people, I will always be second,” she said. “But we’re actually different people. We’re both blondes and we have the same last name, but one is Chiara and the other is Valentina.”

AN INFLUENCER’S EMPIRE EXPANDS

Still, when your sister is a fashion mogul and leader of what some Italian media outlets refer to as “the royal family,” coming in second is not the worst thing. While “my last name 20 years ago was just a last name,” said Valentina Ferragni, it also proved to be an asset in an overcrowded market. Valentina Ferragni Studio reported that its 2021 revenue was five million euros.

It is a market that Chiara Ferragni also decided to enter, at the end of 2021, a year after Valentina launched her jewelry brand. “Our lines do not compete,” said Chiara Ferragni. The older sister’s jewelry is jewelry, crystals and chains with decorative heart-shaped motifs.

Fabio Maria Damato, the general manager of the Chiara Ferragni Collection and Blonde Salad, acknowledged that initially “business people were worried”. But it soon became clear that the two sisters were taking different approaches and running different companies. (After all, don’t Kim and Kylie each sell their own makeup line?)

Damato started working with Ferragni five years ago. A former fashion journalist, he appeared in “The Ferragnez” and in “Chiara Ferragni: Unposted”, a 2019 documentary about the influencer, always in the role of Ferragni’s right-hand man, helping her both to put on complicated clothes and to get right. in difficult business situations, such as regaining control over Blonde Salad, created by Chiara and an ex-boyfriend.

Even now, as the company actively seeks outside investors, Ferragni has no plans to cede control of the business that bears his name. But given the fact that blogs are dead and people “don’t go to websites anymore,” she gave up on Blonde Salad. The blog stopped running new content, which she now reserves for Instagram.

“We discussed closing it, but we decided to keep it open just because it’s part of the story and my story,” Ferragni said.

There was a moment, late last year, when this story seemed to have reached a climax. Although Ferragni has appeared on the covers of dozens of international magazines over the past 10 years, she finally appeared, in October, in the pages of Italian Vogue, her country’s most respected fashion magazine.

Vogue Italia’s aesthetic has always been more artistic and abstract, its tendencies more controversial and its social conscience more acute than that of other editions of the magazine. But at the beginning of 2021, Vogue announced a change in strategy in order to consolidate the leadership of all its international publications.

This led to the promotion of a young woman, Francesca Ragazzi, to the post of editor-in-chief of Vogue Italia. One of her first decisions was to put Ferragni on the cover of an issue dedicated to “new beginnings”, and the publisher defined her as “the ideal protagonist to interpret this new direction”.

For Ferragni and Damato, Vogue Italia’s seal of approval –at last!– was a sign of a broader shift in the country’s fashion, long driven by older designers and executives, and family companies that are often resistant to what women ” generations” have to say, according to Damato. In Milan, more than in other fashionable cities, it is difficult to achieve success before the age of 45.

“When we were young and just starting out, it was difficult,” Damato said. That is changing, and not just because of Ragazzi’s support of Ferragni, he added, but also because of the growing network of young designers, including GCDS’ Giuliano Calza and Attico’s Gilda Ambrosio and Giorgia Tordini.

The older generation of Italian fashion “have a good mutual understanding and mutual respect, but they don’t want to work together,” Ferragni said. “Our generation supports each other more.”

Ferragni points out that this is a new way of doing business in Italy. And that’s also good news for the family’s youngest, Valentina, in her efforts to both stay close to her sister and forge a path of her own.

“I would love for people to understand that we are two different people, we have two different businesses, two different companies, two different brands,” said Valentina Ferragni. “But we help each other. Maybe one day we’ll collaborate.”