Dolce & Gabbana is at the centre of some controversy… again.
This time around its their new campaign thats attracting anger.
As promotion for the brands show in Shanghai today, 21 November, Dolce & Gabbana launched a social media campaign called #DGTheGreatShow. This involved videos with the tag #DGLovesChina promoted on Weibo and Instagram.
Those videos show an Asian woman struggling to eat Italian food such as pasta, pizza, and cannoli with chopsticks.
Those videos have been accused of relying on racist stereotypes, with critics pointing to the appearance of outdated cultural symbols such as lanterns, and the stereotypical styling of the model.
Jing Daily reports that Boycott Dolce has been mentioned on Weibo more than 18,000 times as a result, while on Twitter people are flocking to call the ad campaign racist.
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Diet Prada wrote: In a bid to further appeal to luxurys covetable Chinese consumers, @dolcegabbana released some hella offensive “instructional” videos on the usage of chopsticks.
Pandering at its finest, but taken up a notch by painting their target demographic as a tired and false stereotype of a people lacking refinement/culture to understand how to eat foreign foods and an over-the-top embellishment of cliché ambient music, comical pronunciations of foreign names/words, and Chinese subtitles (English added by us), which begs the question – who is this video actually for?
It attempts to target China, but instead mocks them with a parodied vision of what modern China is not…a gag for amusement.
Then screenshots of even more controversial messages appeared on social media which purported to be sent from Stefano Gabbana, apparently in response to the racism accusations.
Dolce & Gabbana announced that their account, as well as Stefano Gabbanas, had been hacked.
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Our legal office is urgently investigating, wrote the brand on Instagram. We are very sorry for any distress caused by these unauthorized posts, comments and direct messages.
We have nothing but respect for China and the people of China.
The furore appears to have caused damage, with rumours spread that some agencies were pulling their models from the show, while influencers invited to attend announced they would be boycotting the brand.
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The show ended up being cancelled.
We reached out to Dolce & Gabbana, who released the following statement: Our dream was to bring to Shanghai a tribute event dedicated to China which tells our history and vision.
It was not simply a fashion show, but something that we created especially with love and passion for China and all the people around the world who loves Dolce&Gabbana.
What happened today was very unfortunate not only for us, but also for all the people who worked day and night to bring this event to life.
From the bottom of our hearts, we would like to express our gratitude to our friends and guests.
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