The uber-influencer who flew too close to the digital sun

A year before the pandemic, Brunello Cucinelli, the “quiet luxury” baron who lives in a hilltop town in Umbria, told me he believed that soon, “privacy will be the new luxury”. Living under lockdown seemed to put paid to that prediction, as many people found being forced to isolate anything but luxurious.

But Cucinelli’s argument came back to me as a business crisis entirely of her own making hit another star of the Italian luxury firmament, the uber-influencer Chiara Ferragni.

Chiara Ferragni poses for photographers as she arrives for the CNMI sustainable fashion 2023 awards in Milan, Italy.Credit: AP

Ferragni is the populist anti-hero of Cucinelli’s philosophy. She has harvested 30 million followers on Meta’s Instagram and made herself a multimillionaire by entirely eschewing privacy.

For more than a decade, she has incessantly photographed herself in various stages of dress and undress. Her account also features her husband, her mother, her sisters and, more recently, her two small children. From the humble beginnings of taking selfies outside Milan runway shows to which she wasn’t invited, she now has contracts with the same consumer brands that once barred her.

She runs her own clothing line and digital marketing agency, and sits on the board of the leather goods group Tod’s. And there’s the Amazon Prime series about her, adding to the meta absurdity of it all. She describes herself this way on her marketing agency’s website:........

© Brisbane Times