“That space between criticism and praise has been missing, essentially no one has analyzed the phenomenon. The Ferragnez have always been treated as gossip and therefore considered harmless and here is the problem: because with 40 million followers you are also a center of power , so much so that we have seen them enter every field, from culture to politics.”
Selvaggia Lucarelliguest of Francesca Fialdini in the living room Freewheeling herereturns to talk about his work on the Ferragnez, summarized in the investigation book The Pandora’s Box. In the days in which the couple is now shipwrecked and their troubles seem to be multiplying, the journalist, prompted by the presenter, analyzes a phenomenon of “collective spell”, underlining that the mechanisms used in an excellent and ingenious way by the Ferragnez are used by many other influencers, and knowing them can help us behave a little less “like chickens” when we spend our time on social media.
Selvaggia Lucarelli also recalls that until their fall, talking seriously about the Ferragnez phenomenon was not easy: “There was this collective adulation, and when anyone made the slightest criticism they were accused of being envious or obsessed with them. An accusation that arrived even from the media who relaunched every slightest blink of an eye of the couple, they were obsessed, but the obsessed one was the one who raised criticisms about what we saw”.
Speaking of Chiara Ferragni’s initial success in 2009, Lucarelli credits her with having intuited, also thanks to her communication expert at the time, the revolution that would soon explode with social media and having exploited it before the others : “She took the famous train that passes in front of you. There is a component of luck, timing and a companion who routed her.” However, she underlines that having talked for years about a “digital entrepreneur” did not exactly correspond to the reality of things: “This was truly a great collective mistake, and it shows us that on social media we can sell ourselves as what we are not. Chiara Ferragni ended up on the covers of authoritative economics magazines, such as Mario Draghi or Giorgio Armani, but she always remained the same as the beginning, taking selfies, she never did the digital entrepreneur, the decisions were made by D’Amato , any operational role was not his, in the case of the wedding a huge and ingenious commercial operation was made, they did not sell the exclusive to anyone, but they broadcast it live on their Instagram channels, from that moment on the product. it became them and their life, a grandiose and dangerous intuition. Everyone wanted Chiara Ferragni and was willing to accept crazy conditions: she even asked for 150 thousand euros for an advertising photo, but she didn’t give the insights to the companies, she didn’t exist, and yet the companies. they accepted just to have it.”
Then Francesca Fialdini shows a film with other famous couples and protagonists of gossip: Al Bano and Romina, Celentano and Mori, up to Blasi and Totti, and asks Selvaggia Lucarelli what difference there is between the Ferragni-Fedez couple and these others. The answer is stinging:
“Not in the first one, in the others there was talent. The Ferragnezs, as a couple, over the years only sold themselves, there was nothing else, in the other couples gossip played a role, but it illuminated a product that couple created, Al Bano and Romina for example, they made music together. In the case of the Ferragnez, their product was their life.”
If the Ferragnez are the tip of the iceberg, however, the discussion is more general, and concerns everyone, users and content creators. “The problem is that it hasn’t been understood that influencers don’t tell us about their lives because they like us, they’re always seeing something in us. It’s a mechanism that we who create content also undergo, sometimes almost without realizing it, we end up chasing algorithms and trends to make more money. Lately I have realized that I too have been a victim of this. I wanted to go to Nepal on holiday but since I went there last year I thought not to because I would have posted it same content. So I too am dissociated, the risk is that we only think about the instagrammable part of us.”
