Il tempo di Instagram e TikTok. Accelerazione e immedialità nella influence culture

This chapter examines how Instagram and TikTok reshape the temporal organisation of influence culture, arguing that time is a key sociological category for understanding contemporary transformations in fashion and digital media. Using Chiara Ferragni as an emblematic case (focusing on the period before the December 2023 “Pandoro-gate”), it shows how the influencer’s biography increasingly takes the form of a cross-platform narrative seriality: a continuous sequence of micro-episodes (feeds, stories, short videos) in which everyday life, commercial promotion and cultural production become tightly entangled. The chapter then reconstructs the evolution of fashion influencing between 2000 and 2025 through five phases, highlighting the shift from a fashion-calendar-driven temporality to a platformised regime in which algorithmic visibility governs rhythms of production and recognition. Temporal acceleration is unpacked into distinct yet interconnected processes—algorithmic, productive, consumptive (attention-based) and communicative—intensifying hyperproductivity, content obsolescence and the commodification of user time as attention. Finally, the chapter proposes the concept of “immediality” to capture a hybrid condition where mediatised everyday life and the ideology of nowness converge, eroding the temporal autonomy of the fashion field as time increasingly “produces” fashion rather than the reverse.