Going to meet Chiara Ferragni, social media meteorite, is like going to see the queen of a small realm. In fact, not so small a realm. She is the founder of theblondesalad.com, a fashion blog that has turned into a global retail business, with 17m followers on Instagram, equivalent to the population of the Netherlands. Add in her husband, the Italian superstar rapper Fedez, and their combined followers (25m) equal the population of Australia. The equivalent of the UK (67m) watched, shared, or read about the #Ferragnez three-day wedding extravaganza in Sicily last September as it unfolded on social media: she wore three custom-made dresses by Dior. The capital of her world in Milan, where Ferragni grew up and where she first started taking photographs of herself outside fashion shows and sharing them with friends. Ferragni’s face, she tells me later, will be plastered all over the building as a hoarding during Milan’s upcoming fashion week, which seems an apt metaphor for what digital has done to traditional media. But this meeting is not to talk about Ferragni’s rise as a media star. Instead, she wants to talk about her desire to be recognized as an entrepreneur. It is 10 years since Ferragni started writing her blog, in Italian and English, while studying international law at Milan’s Bocconi University. She never finished her degree as her fame in Italy grew fast enough to earn her a decent living. She wanted to internationalize herself, learn English and lose her Italian accent. Soon after, Forbes named her in its “30 under 30” list of power brokers and Spanish Vogue put her on its cover. Harvard Business School used her as a case study on how to monetize the dual streams of a blog and a personal brand as a business. She returned to Italy in 2016, as the world’s most-followed fashion blogger with the international recognition she wanted and endorsement deals worth thousands of dollars.
Three-quarters of her followers are in Europe, first of all in Italy, followed by France, Russia, and Spain. Another 15 percent are in Asia and the rest are in the US. The clothing and accessories line that she launched in 2010 sells on her own websites, in flagship stores in Milan, Paris, and Shanghai, in pop-up stores, such as Selfridges and Le Bon Marché, and on Alibaba’s Tmall and JD.com in China.