This article investigates how fashion companies build their relationships with digital influencers (DIs), a new group of cultural intermediaries who are increasingly central to brand communication strategies. Scholars have mostly studied DIs’ role in influencing the market, but largely neglected the process through which they build their work. Through a qualitative inductive research directed at 21 Italian fashion companies, we describe the process through which companies fabricate the authenticity work, while collaborating with DIs. By taking the overlooked perspective of the company brand owner, we identify the underlying dynamics of achieving co-fabricated authenticity, unpacking the mechanisms through which companies select DIs, shape the connections and regulate the reciprocity with them. Our findings highlight how companies and DIs’ practices become intertwined, with the commodity of authenticity being constructed at the crossroads between the former’s commercial needs and the latter’s grassroots narratives and practices. ‘Co-fabricated authenticity’ ultimately emerges as the result of the work of those actors who are engaged in managing the authenticity or processes of authentication of marketable goods: the intangible and ephemeral value of authenticity is made tangible and co-produced through the collaboration between brands and cultural intermediaries such as DIs.

本文调查时尚公司如何与数字影响者 (DI) 建立关系，这是一个新的文化中介群体，他们越来越成为品牌传播战略的核心。学者们大多研究了 DI 在影响市场方面的作用，但在很大程度上忽略了他们建立工作的过程。通过针对 21 家意大利时装公司的定性归纳研究，我们描述了公司在与 DI 合作的同时制作真实性作品的过程。通过从公司品牌所有者被忽视的角度出发，我们确定了实现共同制造真实性的潜在动力，揭示了公司选择 DI、塑造联系并规范与他们的互惠的机制。我们的发现强调了公司和 DI 的实践如何交织在一起，真实性商品是在前者的商业需求与后者的草根叙事和实践之间构建的。“共同制造的真实性”最终是那些参与管理真实性或可销售商品认证过程的参与者工作的结果：真实性的无形和短暂价值通过之间的合作变得有形和共同生产品牌和文化中介机构，例如 DI。