Besieged influencer Chiara Ferragni is the talk of Milan Fashion Week

By far Italy’s most glamorous and celebrated influencer, Ferragni, 36, pioneered the business of self-branding and paid posts in Milan, starting as a fashion blogger before shifting her storytelling from documenting designer get-ups and handbags to tracking every dimension of her personal life.

Milan: What becomes of a famous influencer when followers suddenly drop her by the hundreds of thousands, sponsors start running for the exits and the reputation underpinning all that influence is suddenly derailed?

That question was on a lot of minds during men’s fashion week in Milan, where even excited chatter about a surprise front-row appearance by Jeff Bezos and his girlfriend, Lauren Sánchez, at the Dolce & Gabbana show was quickly overtaken by whispered updates on the weird case of Chiara Ferragni.

As many are aware, Ferragni is a digital entrepreneur with her own production agency, her own Prime Video series, 29 million Instagram followers and more problems at the moment than the best glow-up can conceal.

By far Italy’s most glamorous and celebrated influencer, Ferragni, 36, pioneered the business of self-branding and paid posts in Milan, starting as a fashion blogger before shifting her storytelling from documenting designer get-ups and handbags and her tastes in nail art, makeup palettes and drip coffee to tracking every dimension of her personal life.

After her marriage to Italian rapper Federico Leonardo Lucia — stage name Fedez — in 2018, she went on to showcase her daily existence minutely across social media. Using a variety of formats and platforms, Ferragni posted details of her idyllic wedding and subsequent relationship bobbles, including sessions in couples therapy. When she became pregnant, she posted prenatal ultrasounds of her children, Vittoria and Leone, and would later track their growth spurts and elf costumes in so much detail that it attracted the attention of child welfare advocates.

She deployed social media to track her husband’s cancer treatment and family ski holidays in the Alps, and she routinely beckoned followers into the closet of a multimillion-dollar penthouse she owns in the luxury CityLife complex in central Milan as well as a retreat they recently constructed near George Clooney’s villa on the shores of Lake Como.

Then, abruptly, in the weeks before Christmas, Ferragni went dark. The reasons became clear when accusations resurfaced of a charitable giving scam involving her and first reported on in December 2022.

“Italian social media star faces thorny questions over charity cake fraud,” Financial Times wrote of an investigation by the Milan prosecutor’s office into the sale of a pink-boxed Christmas cake, or pandoro, produced that year by the venerable Balocco bakery conglomerate and branded with Ferragni’s name. Consumers flocked to buy the traditional cake despite its $10 price tag — more than 2 1/2 times the cost of a normal pandoro — lured by the Ferragni association but also the influencer’s implication on social media posts that money from the sales would be directed toward buying equipment for a children’s cancer hospital.

As it happened, the cause the influencer had earmarked for charity was herself. (The Balocco bakery donated money to the hospital months before the cakes were put on sale.) “In reality, Chiara Ferragni earned a million euros for putting her name on the pandoro,” Selvaggia Lucarelli, a journalist who first reported the story in the newspaper Domani, wrote in an email. But in 2022, “the story had limited media resonance,” she said, “because Chiara Ferragni was powerful and untouchable.”

But that was before local officials initiated a criminal investigation into her about aggravated fraud, followed by an Italian consumer rights group bringing a class-action suit. Eventually, Ferragni consented to pay a substantial fine, donating her fee for hosting the annual Sanremo Music Festival, Italy’s most popular television broadcast, for what she termed a “communication error.” Yet, despite the gesture of contrition, she found herself abandoned by major sponsors such as Coca-Cola, eyewear giant Safilo and then by followers in the hundreds of thousands.

When, at last, Ferragni resurfaced on Instagram after the Christmas holidays, it was to post a distinctly unglamorous mea culpa reel. In it, the social media star appeared starkly deglamorized, wearing scant makeup and dressed in a drab gray shirt resembling prison garb, to issue a public apology and to announce a genuine personal donation, this one 1 million euros to the Regina Margherita Hospital in Turin, Italy.

Even at that, it took no time for critics to seize on her misjudged optics, noting that the shirt she was wearing sells for 600 euros and is cashmere, and for memes to proliferate poking fun at her wardrobe choices, her no-longer-exalted status as one half of a glamour couple known as “Ferragnez” and even the family dog.

“Unfortunately, she must have bad people around her and made all the wrong choices,” said Raffaello Napoleone, CEO of Pitti Immagine, an Italian fashion and design trade group, before the Neil Barrett menswear show Saturday. “When you make an apology, you have to appear as you really are. She appeared as a nun, and she is not a nun.”

It was no help to Ferragni’s cause that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni took to attacking her in fiery public speeches as an affront to decency, honesty and the very core of “Italianity,” or Italianness. And in that, some saw not only political opportunism (Fedez has been a vocal critic of the right-wing leader), but also “more than a whiff of misogyny,” as one fashion critic noted at the Dsquared show, speaking anonymously in adherence with her publication’s employment guidelines.

“Yes, she overstepped, as maybe all the influencers overstep by becoming gurus,” the critic added. “But the woman-on-woman attack feeds into a prevailing anti-feminist rhetoric.”

Whether that is so, there is no doubting the pass-along effects that Ferragni’s missteps have had on what Rupert Younger, director of the Center for Corporate Reputation at the University of Oxford, termed in Financial Times as “reputational risk.”

Consider that, despite deep seasonal discounts posted on the shiny branded goods that fill the racks and windows of the slick Ferragni store near Corso Como this busy past weekend, there was barely a shopper to be seen. No one around was spotted toting one of Chiara Ferragni’s signature bags with their logo of an oversize eye.

The scene was similar at the Ferragni outpost in Rome, according to a report in La Repubblica, Italy’s largest newspaper. Gawkers stopped to gape at the windows. Then they walked right past.

“The criminal charges are not the most important part of the story,” Lucarelli said. “They might lead to nothing.” What is important to watch, she said, is what happens after a powerful influencer’s reputation falters and with it the “adoration of her followers, who felt betrayed.”

What, in other words, is left to sell once you’ve sold out?