Young and Elderly Fashion Influencers

The aim of this paper is to analyse a new phenomenon that has emerged in the fashion system: the advent of female fashion influencers over 70. To outline all the novelties this brings with it, we produced a comparison between elderly and young fashion influencers along the evolution of the fashion system in the last decade. We considered both the first wave of fashion blogging (2012–15) populated by young fashion bloggers and the second wave (2015–19) in which we considered especially elderly fashion influencers. At the operational level, we selected the four fashion bloggers who were most followed on Facebook in 2011 in Italy: Chiara Ferragni (theblondesalad.com), Veronica Ferraro (thefashionfruit.com), Nicoletta Reggio (scentofobsession.com), and Irene Colzi (ireneccloset.com). Regarding old women, in 2019 we selected the top 20 elderly influencers over 70, identified using Instagram’s search feature to detect age-related trends (i.e., using hashtags such as #over70 or #advancedstyle). While the four young fashion influencers are Italian, for the older fashion influencers we needed to select English-speaking women from across the globe, as this phenomenon is still just beginning in Italy. We applied qualitative and quantitative methods to capture bloggers’ online strategies and activities for two weeks at both the discursive and visual levels. The results show that while young fashion influencers have been incorporated into the fashion system, fashion influencers over 70 are still producing an important discourse for women, the elderly, and the whole society, although the initial attempts on the part of fashion houses to colonize them are emerging.