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