Just yesterday (21st November), popular Italian luxury fashion house Dolce & Gabbana (aka D&G), came under fire after a controversial ad promoting their upcoming show in Shanghai surfaced.
The advertisement, which featured a Chinese model attempting to eat Italian food like pizza, a giant cannoli, and pasta with a pair of chopsticks, garnered a lot of flak for stereotyping Chinese people. Popular fashion Instagram account that often calls out designers who “knock each other off” @diet_prada criticised D&G’s ad, calling them out for depicting the Chinese as “a tired and false stereotype of a people lacking refinement/culture to understand how to eat foreign foods.”
Due to the immense amount of backlash, Dolce & Gabbana removed the ads from social media. However, the damage was already done as the videos were reuploaded and already began circulating on Chinese social media along with the hashtag #BoycottDolce.
If things didn’t look bad enough already, the situation escalated even further when an Instagram DM conversation between co-founder of D&G Stefano Gabbana, and fashion writer Michaela Phuong, surfaced online.
In the conversation, Gabbana defended the fashion house’s campaign and began making racist and demeaning comments about China and its people.
This exchange understandably caused more outrage, resulting in some of the country’s biggest celebrities like Zhang Ziyi to boycott D&G.
The fashion label then took to Instagram to inform their followers that their account as well as Stefano Gabbana’s, were allegedly hacked, much to many netizens’ disbelief. They also issued an apology not long after that but the damage was already done. Do you think their accounts were really hacked?
Models and other prominent Chinese celebrities soon bowed out of the Shanghai fashion show, swearing never to purchase anything from Dolce & Gabbana again and the show was eventually cancelled. This show was meant to be the label’s biggest promotional event of the year.
What are your thoughts on this controversy? Let us know in the comments below!
Also read: Those Above 60kg Should Not Attend Fashion Shows, Says M’sian Fashion Critic