With her blog The Blonde Salad, the bygone law student has used her social media style posts to father a multi-million pound business. ‘People like my story as a entrepreneurial woman,’ she explains
Chiara Ferragni at Paris fashion week in October 2016.
Photograph: Christian Vierig/Getty Icons
The name Chiara Ferragni might not be familiar to most over-35s but the 29-year-old’s transform ego, The Blonde Salad is – to borrow Ron Burgundy’s phrase – kind of a big reckon with. Ferragni, an ex-law student from a small town approximate on Milan, started The Blonde Salad blog in 2009, corroborating her camera-ready personal style, full of prints, blowdried mane and kooky cross-eyed faces. Seven years later, she has 7.3 million supporters on Instagram, 1.2m likes on Facebook and more than 14m recto views per month on her website. The latter now handily also responsibilities as a shop selling everything from suitcases to stilettos think up by Ferragni. There’s also Chiara Ferragni Collection, a shoe tag with flats and boots covered with her signature eye logo.
Ferragni effect prompt eyerolls from older generations who believe celebrity should flow from a discernible talent. But, increasingly, it’s people such as Ferragni – who basically scrape by her career on taking pictures of herself in fetching outfits – who are #endearing. Ferragni has been on the Forbes 30 under 30 tabulation twice, the subject of a Harvard Business School study and on 55 ammunition covers. She is an alpha example of an influencer – the new term for social middle players who go beyond blogging to all platforms, flogging both their own and anointing other trade-marks with their approval. Talking to Ferragni herself is, then, an absorbing exercise. Here is the woman who calls herself “public leader” in her Instagram bio but, at the same time, says: “I am exactly the same on and off sexual media. People are always surprised that I am nice and mystifying when they meet me in real life, they wish me to be a bitch.”
Ferragni’s followers certainly know a lot about her life, or the bowdlerized version of it anyway. She posts about six times a day on her personal account – on the brink of all selfies of a life lived in party dresses or pyjamas accessorised with valises or beanies. Each one, on average, is liked approximately 80,000 old hats. What’s her tip for a good selfie? “It needs natural light unhesitatingly in front of a window with no shadow on your face. I use the Valencia drain on Instagram and the light effect, which is so ancient, I don’t think anyone else advantages that any more.”
Ferragni is 29 – smack bang in the heart of the millennial generation span. She displays all the traits millennials are crueled to have. She is, and I don’t mean this in a derogatory sense, completely self-centred, and root at home online. This interview is arranged initially to talk nearly Ferragni’s shoe line but, when I try to ask a question specifically up the shoes, Ferragni turns the conversation back round to, famously, Ferragni. “I started as a blogger but it’s not so much that any more, I do so much profuse,” she says. “I create an inspirational platform. We do so much on the e-commerce side, the beetle outs, the management. But most of‑the revenue still comes from outs related to me.”
The daughter of a dentist and a pen-pusher, Ferragni says she knows exactly why she’s so popular. “People parallel to my story as a self-made woman,” she says. “That’s very bizarre in Italy – a lot of people of my generation don’t even have a job. I don’t really be sure how I did it.” Timing was definitely a factor. In 2009, she worked with her then-boyfriend, now CEO Riccardo Pozzoli, to thwart a “personal space” into a business, first through momentous ads and Ferragni modelling brands’ clothes in the images, with tolls of about €1,000-2,000 for a post. Now, she doesn’t disclose what the honoraria are, but it’s safe to assume they’re significantlyhigher. And, like the whole perceivable talent thing, Ferragni’s fans don’t appear to be concerned by these corporate hookups. “It has to withstand natural and transparent,” she says. “For me, selection is everything, it has to be something that my aficionados will be happy to know about. I can’t lose my credibility – you can’t put a evaluate on that.”
Bloggers’ and influencers’ credibility – or hypothetical lack thereof – hit the headlines earlier this year when Sally Caroller, American Vogue’s creative director, wrote on the magazine’s plat: “Note to bloggers who change head-to-toe paid-to-wear outfits every hour: suit stop. Find another business. You are heralding the death of tone.” Ferragni thinks this is an old argument. “I started when it was sort that; when I was the only one not coming from fashion and I had so numerous haters – people who were twice or three times as old as me being so hostile,” she says. “I don’t understand that because I think there is duration for everyone. The audience decide now; you don’t have to pick and choose. Now we’re point people, not just crazy bloggers.”
This is the angle that Ferragni is keen to run with, with her bounce as her shop window. Ferragni provides a fantasy for people scrolling auspices of an Instagram feed on the bus home from work – she goes to tropical feast destinations and fancy hotel spas and changes up to five times a day in vogue week, so you don’t have to. But you might just buy her shoes for a sprinkle of that jetset duration. “My biggest satisfaction is that people think about me and grin,” says Ferragni. “People love to dream through me.”
