The first in a series of in-depth articles on the biggest Street Stylers and bloggers in the fashion world. This week; it’s the turn of Chiara Ferragni
Chiara Ferragni is something of an oddity when it comes to bloggers that transcend their genre and become street stylers and eventual businesswomen. Her rise was meteoric by most standards and considering her blog has only been in existence for 5 years, it has progressed in leaps and bounds. So how did she do it?
The answer is we might never really know the ins-and-outs of her success, but it’s interesting to have a look at her past and she where she came from. Information about her prior to her launching her blog is very scant on the internet, but one thing that is revealed time and again is that she was a law student at Bocconi University in Milan when she launched her blog in October 2009. Prior to her launching her own website, she was prominent on website s like Flickr and LookBook.nu, where she would post fashion images that she or her boyfriend Riccardo took. They are an informative look into her life before her meteoric rise to fame, and they show a college student enjoying life with her friends and boyfriend, much like any other girl her age.
Even from her earliest images on Flickr, we can see that she already had an appreciation for designer handbags. The most obvious answer for this is that her parents are quite well-off and I do believe one or two of her earliest bags were loans from her mother. Riccardo admits that both of them come from wealthy families, and while that doesn’t detract from the success they both enjoyed as a result of their hard work, it did give them a heads up.
It is also worth noting that her ex-boyfriend Riccardo is the true brains behind the operation. Even though they’ve split up now, he is still a founding member of The Blonde Salad, General Manager of TBS Crew, a fashion consultancy group, and a major player behind the scenes. They met back in 2006, when she was studying at the State University and he convinced her to move instead to Bocconi where he was studying law. Though Chiara, in another interview, admitted both studied law there, it becomes very obvious very quickly that Riccardo is more of a businessman than a lawyer. While doing an internship in Chicago in 2009, Riccardo noticed the transformative power of the online blogger and within a few weeks had bought Chiara her domain name; and the rest they say is history.
So to answer my earlier question of how Chiara and her blog became the global brand that it has become; the answer is rather simple. It’s a combination of luck, fantastic timing and the brilliant partnership of Chiara and Riccardo. He has the business brain to pull this idea off, and she has the creative talent and drive to make her blog stand out from all the others out there purely by the high quality of photogras she posts.
And it seems to have worked; she moved from being an ordinary blogger to quickly establishing business partnerships with designer brands, launching her own shoe collection, running a company, writing a book, moving to another continent and expanding her brand into the lifestyle magazine it is today. So I tip my hat to one of my favourite bloggers, and in celebration here’s a little gallery of some of my favourite outfits and collaborations she’s done over the years.
Images are the property of The Blonde Salad
