In her constant stream of Instagram stories, Chiara Ferragni chronicled exclusive photo shoots, intimate hangouts with Paris Hilton, Dua Lipa, and Donatella Versace, lavish weekends away in the Alps and Portofino, and lazy mornings in with her two adorable kids, who look like carbon copies of her, to her 29.2 million followers.
She also made room for the many products she promotes under her Chiara Ferragni brand—from lipstick to coffee machines to children’s school supplies—as well as, occasionally, her husband, Federico Leonardo Lucia, Italy’s biggest rapper (known as Fedez), who co-stars in the couple’s Amazon reality-TV show, The Ferragnez.
Then, all of a sudden, she went dark.
The Rise
For the unacquainted, the 36-year-old Milan-based influencer is one of the first Instagram superstars, who, like the Kardashians, grew a following that transcended her home country.
Her version of a sex tape was her blog, the Blonde Salad, which she started in 2009 while studying international law at Bocconi University. From there she endured the requisite influencer cringe phase of posting nonstop and stalking Fashion Weeks wearing atrocious outfits, and came out the other side with more sponsorship deals than one could ever imagine and a fan base ready to buy or endorse practically anything she touched.
Ferragni’s star-studded 2018 wedding cemented her status as one of the world’s top influencers, and her and Fedez’s $4 million coronavirus fundraising campaign during the early days of the pandemic, which hit their area of Northern Italy particularly hard, helped forge a persona built not so much around flaunting her increasing wealth—a major ingredient in the Kardashian formula—but rather on authenticity and humility.
In 2022, Ferragni made $15 million from sponsorship deals and digital campaigns alone, while her namesake clothing brand brought in almost 15.5 million. Her following grew to nearly half the population of Italy.
Throughout this meteoric rise, she continued to strike a seemingly perfect balance between glamorous and real. “With Chiara,” one fan tells me, “there was always this sense of What you see is what you get.”
“She’s real, and raw,” another fan says. “People think she’s smart and are impressed by her intelligence. Which isn’t usual when discussing influencers.”
“With Chiara, there was always this sense of What you see is what you get.”
It all came crashing down on December 15, 2023, when Italy’s anti-trust authority fined Ferragni for $1 million, accusing the influencer of misleading consumers. Shortly thereafter, Milan’s prosecutor’s office announced that Ferragni was under investigation for aggravated fraud.
In 2022, the influencer had sold Chiara Ferragni–branded, pink-boxed pandori—Italian Christmas cakes—in collaboration with the pastry company Balocco for $10 each (more than twice the market rate). Her Instagram campaign implied that a percentage of the sales income would be used to purchase equipment for Regina Margherita, a children’s hospital in Turin.
It turns out that while a $54,000 donation was made to the hospital ahead of the sales, Ferragni herself pocketed $1 million, according to Italian news outlets. (She has since promised to donate the same sum to the hospital.)
A few days after the fraud investigation was announced, news emerged that the proceeds of Easter-egg sales promoted by Ferragni and intended to benefit children with autism in 2021 and 2022 saw Ferragni collect a fee of $540,000 and $750,000, respectively, from the partnered brand, while the charitable foundation received a total of $39,000.
The fallout was fast: Coca-Cola announced it would not be airing an advertisement it had filmed with Ferragni earlier that year. Safilo eyewear, the company that produces her namesake glasses, cut ties. She lost roughly 200,000 followers. And, last week, rumors began circulating that Fedez had moved out.
All the tumult has led many to ask: Is this the ultimate reckoning for Italy’s top influencer?
The Fall
Three days after the fine was officially announced, Ferragni posted an apology video on Instagram. Dark circles lined her teary eyes, and her hair was pulled back in an unruly bun. But her followers’ responses were anything but sympathetic.
“Crocodile tears,” one user wrote.
“Fake … you’re just fake,” wrote another.
“The higher you climb,” another said, “the harder the thump when you fall.”
Even Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s right-wing prime minister, weighed in. “The real role models to follow,” she said during a televised statement, “are not the influencers … who promote very expensive panettoni supposedly for charity, then pay themselves million-dollar fees.” (Many suspect that Meloni’s ire predates the scandal—Ferragni and her husband have long been vocal about their left-leaning views, especially when it comes to women’s and L.G.B.T.I.Q.A.+ rights, and in 2021, Fedez publicly accused the state-owned television network, Rai, of censorship.)
Despite Ferragni limiting comments under her posts and staying uncharacteristically quiet since, the uproar around her hasn’t waned. After she visited a hotel in Valle d’Aosta in January, it was showered with negative reviews on Google. Used to gracing all of the front rows of Fashion Week in her home city of Milan, she instead spent the most recent one at home. She’s being reportedly harassed on the street, and people are going so far as to compare her to Wanna Marchi, the Italian TV presenter and fraudster who spent six years in federal prison for telemarketing scams.
“Given the government scrutiny, the ongoing court case,” one of her fans tells me, “I’d be surprised if she makes it through. I would start thinking of alternative career paths if I were her.”
“It’s lasted a long time,” another fan says. “And people still aren’t forgetting.”
Others believe it’ll take a lot more to cause Ferragni’s demise. Though Coca-Cola and Safilo ended their partnerships with her, many brands with whom she has lucrative deals, including Pantene, Nespresso, and Louis Vuitton, have stayed conspicuously quiet. Tod’s founder and C.E.O. Diego Della Valle came to the defense of Ferragni, who joined the company’s board in 2021, making the following statement in the aftermath of the scandal: “In our dealings, Chiara Ferragni has always been beyond reproach.” As Selvaggia Lucarelli, the journalist who first reported the scandal in the Italian newspaper Domani, put it, in Italy, Ferragni has been “untouchable.”
Ferragni’s public-relations skills are also a force to be reckoned with. Last week, in an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera—her first since the scandal, which she attended in person and without any P.R. advisers by her side—she navigated difficult questions about the scandal with perfect elegance, taking accountability for what she referred to as a “communication error” while refuting the claims of fraud: “In … my posts we stated that ‘Chiara Ferragni and Balocco are supporting the hospital,’ without ever mentioning that a portion of the sales would be donated to charity.”
Then there’s her rumored separation from Fedez, which, if confirmed, might actually prove to be the ultimate media coup—after all, Kim Kardashian’s high-profile divorce from Kanye West, who is similar to Fedez in both his level of fame and his erratic nature, only helped to increase her follower count.
The separation might also offer Ferragni the chance to rekindle an authentic relationship with her followers—a marked difference from the Kardashian model. “They rose to fame and influence at a time where we wanted ‘aspirational’ content,” the marketing expert Jamie Love said of the Kardashians in a 2023 interview. “For the new generation, authenticity trumps perfection—people want the real thing.”
If she’s to be trusted, a raw, broken Ferragni couldn’t have come at a more perfect time. “She’ll find a different way to be in the public eye,” one fan says, “because that’s what she’s born to do.”
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at AIR MAIL