A MESSAGE FROM HARRY WINSTON

This holiday season, give the gift that shines forever. Visit your nearest Harry Winston salon and discover a gift that’s as radiant as you.

Now, here’s Rachel…

Last week, tabloid readers of a certain age might have noticed a familiar, if semi-forgotten, name popping up in their news feeds. The New York Post and others ran stories about Chiara Ferragni, a.k.a. The Blonde Salad, the O.G. fashion blogger turned influencer turned Italian Kardashian who is currently facing legal troubles in her native Italy, where she was indicted on fraud charges earlier this year.

During the early days of the fashion blogosphere, Ferragni’s The Blonde Salad, which she started in 2009, occupied an outsize portion of the industry’s collective consciousness. At the time, Ferragni mostly posted photos of her outfits, which included a mix of designer handbags (mostly Balenciaga, Chanel, and Gucci) paired with lots of Zara, American Apparel, Diesel, etcetera. But more than anything, Ferragni made her name as the first influencer to really make it––sit front row at Fashion Week, appear on major magazine covers, get brands to pay her six (and eventually seven) figures to front their lines, and build a multimillion-dollar business out of selling her own products. In many ways, her current predicament is a strange coda to an era that preceded the modern, sprawling TikTok-ification of fashion consumption.

A MESSAGE FROM HARRY WINSTON

This holiday season, give the gift that shines forever. Celebrate the holiday season with the timeless brilliance of diamond jewelry by Harry Winston.

In short, Ferragni was accused of misleading the public, and her 28 million or so Instagram followers, into believing that the sales of her branded Pandoro Christmas cakes in 2022—a collaboration with Balocco, an Italian confectioner—were part of a charitable effort to support the Regina Margherita children’s hospital in Turin. According to reports, Balocco only made a one-time donation of  €50,000 to the hospital, and Ferragni never made a personal donation, even though she was paid €1 million for the partnership. (Similar complaints later arose about a collaboration Ferragni did with a Spanish candymaker.)

When the allegations first broke, Ferragni called them disproportionate and unfair, and chalked up l’affaire Pandoro to a miscommunication. She’s paid more than €3.5 million in various fines since the original allegations came to light, and has made efforts to repair her image, including public apologies and opening up about the dissolution of her marriage. Amid the scrutiny, she even scrubbed her children from social media. But on Tuesday, at a pretrial hearing in Milan, prosecutors asked that she serve a 20-month prison sentence over aggravated fraud charges related to the sales of the Christmas cakes. (Balocco, meanwhile, has been fined €460,000.)

Through it all, Ferragni has mostly continued posting to her millions of Instagram followers, as if nothing were going on. While she long ago surpassed influencer status in Italy—where she’s an actual celebrity—Ferragni has largely faded from the zeitgeist in the U.S., thanks to the pandemic and the rise of a new generation of TikTok talent. Talking to U.S. friends last week, it seemed that most weren’t even aware of this scandal. But, as one fashion insider recently reminded me, “Chiara was the original blueprint, the blonde, ‘basic girl’ influencer, but make it Italian. She was the founding father of blogging, the mother of all influencers.”

As l’affaire Pandoro resurfaced in U.S. tabloids last week, I called up Jennifer Powell, who runs a brand management and strategy agency for influencers, and played and seminal role in Ferragni’s ascent. In 2009, she was working as a model agent at Next when Ferragni and her boyfriend at the time, Riccardo Pozzoli, reached out to inquire about representation. The following year, Powell planned a U.S. road trip for the two, which involved visiting places like the Grand Canyon, in pursuit of integrating Ferragni into American culture. Two years later, Ferragni was a global Fashion Week fixture. She walked for Alberta Ferretti during Pitti Immagine Uomo in January 2011, and attended her first New York Fashion Week a month later. By September, Ferragni was attending New York, Milan, and Paris Fashion Weeks.

It’s genuinely hard to conceive of now, but sitting the likes of Ferragni at shows was basically heresy to many veterans of an industry whose social hierarchies are literally mapped out with each season’s seating charts. Often written off as silly purveyors of outfit posts and beauty tutorials, Ferragni and her generational peers—Leandra Medine, Aimee Song, Bryanboy’s Bryan Grey Yambao, Susie Bubble, etcetera—elicited sneers from those who had come up via the traditional path of anonymous fashion closet work and endless market appointments. But the bloggers were connecting with followers in ways that traditional media couldn’t. The shrewder brands quickly understood that fact.

Eventually, Ferragni signed six-figure deals with Revolve and Redken, and created a capsule collection with Steve Madden that sold out in the U.S. and Europe. “She loved American culture, and it ended up loving her back,” Powell said, adding that Ferragni’s partnership with Steve Madden, in particular, was career-making. “She knew she had a big commercial footprint and wasn’t too precious about working with a commercial brand in a very big way. She didn’t think she wouldn’t do covers. Ricardo understood that this was a big P.R. and marketing moment, and that for them, the path was to move into product.”

I recently dug up an article I wrote in 2014, titled “The Business of Blogging,” in which I noted that Ferragni’s remarkably lucrative product business was on track to do close to $8 million in revenue that year, driven mostly by her footwear brand, Chiara Ferragni Collection. By that time, The Blonde Salad had a 14-person team, known as “the TBS Crew,” and Pozzoli was officially enshrined as the operation’s co-founder and general manager. In the years that followed, Ferragni was the cover star for a number of mainstream magazines, including Lucky’s February 2015 issue, and became the first blogger to appear on a Vogue cover (it was Spanish Vogue).

In a way, Ferragni was to influencer-founded brands what Kylie Jenner was to the modern celebrity beauty label. The Chiara Ferragni Collection was never a huge business, and Ferragni’s holding company reportedly came close to bankruptcy between 2022 and 2024, according to The Cut, when revenue dropped from €14 million to €2 million. But Ferragni was probably the first fashion content creator to parlay her posts into millions of dollars’ worth of product—and in the process she became a bizarro, Italian version of the Kardashians. (Her younger sisters, Valentina and Francesca, have each gained sizable followings of their own, and both appeared in The Ferragnez, a reality show featuring Ferragni and Fedez, her now-ex husband, an Italian rapper.)

Now, as Ferragni faces the prospect of nearly two years behind bars, there’s another media figure to whom she might, perhaps unavoidably, be compared. Martha Stewart, of course, did six months at a federal prison camp, emerged slightly humbled, and went on to amass more clout than ever. And while it’s possible that the January verdict will bring an end to the legendary saga of The Blonde Salad, if we’ve learned anything from Martha, it’s that a redemption arc is always possible.

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Happy Thanksgiving,
Lauren

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