SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE DOLCE & GABBANA DEBACLE
Instagram site Diet Prada is known for calling out designers and brands who copycat ( yes the fashion industry is full of them), and broke the news last week and shared posts of one of their followers DM'S with Stefano Gabbana, which started off fairly civil and then deteriorated into ignorant racist comments on Gabbana's side. Stefano Gabbana, a company co-founder and designer, appears to have engaged in a bout of insulting name-calling (including suggesting that the Chinese eat dogs) and is a country full of s**t.
The furore that caused this exchange was that on November 19, Dolce &
Gabbana published a series of promotional videos for its “Great Show” fashion extravaganza planned for the 21st in Shanghai. The series of videos featured a Chinese model attempting to eat Italian food, spaghetti, cannoli and pizza with chopsticks. Though the video was removed from the brand's Chinese social media sites ( it's still viewable on the Dolce & Gabbana Instagram account) it created a media storm which led to derogatory comments about China and its internet users attributed to co-founder Stefano Gabbana on his personal Instagram, as well as the brand's official account. It was later announced that the 500-look runway show was cancelled, and the brand and Gabbana claimed that both accounts were hacked. As Gabbana is known for trolling celebrities and making gross and rude comments, hardly anyone seemed to believe the hacking story.
Numerous celebrities and influencers' published passionate responses in the wake of the Dolce & Gabbana's debacle. Actress Zhang Zyi posted on her Weibo account that she would no longer “buy [nor] use any D&G products,” and celebrities and influencers such as Li Bingbing and many others have all made social media posts to express their Chinese pride and withdraw their support for the brand. Models slated to walk the runway such as Victoria's Secret favourite Estelle
Chen, as well as ones that have worked with the brand previously, also expressed their disgust through social media. Lucky Blue Smith, a model/influencer with 3.2 million followers on Instagram who has become a millennial Dolce staple, posted a note on his account explaining his decision to skip the show that read in part, “We are all God's children and we should all be treating EVERYONE, EVERY CULTURE with respect. I will be back to China soon — love you all so much.”
The issue has also made waves at a government level whom many believe forced Dolce and Gabbana to cancel their 500 look Chinese extravaganza fashion show and last Thursday, journalists asked foreign ministry spokesperson Geng
Shuang about the future of Dolce & Gabbana in the China market at a press conference in Beijing as their products have disappeared from Chinese e-commerce sites. He said “It is not a diplomatic issue and China does not wish to escalate it into one. Instead of asking the foreign ministry spokesperson, it is better to ask the ordinary people in China to see how they view this issue.”
With their reputation in rags in China, brand
founders Domenico Dolce & Stefano Gabbana apologised “We offer our sincerest apologies to Chinese people worldwide,” said Gabbana. Dolce continued: “We hope our misunderstanding of Chinese culture can be forgiven. “We've always been very crazy about China, we've visited it a lot. We've been to many cities. We love your culture.” The video ended with the pair saying the single word “sorry” in Mandarin.
Chinese consumers are at present responsible for 32 percent of luxury goods sales worldwide, a number expected to grow to 40 percent by 2024, at which point the Chinese will drive 75 percent of the growth of the global market.
Someday this ongoing debacle will be a cautionary tale with it's moral being the dangers of illconsidered Social Media communication, the swift retribution of the crowd and the hazards of cultural arrogance. But right now the story's most striking revelation is what happens when a history of playground-bullying online meets the economic force of the fastest-growing, most important and very autocratic luxury market.
The furore that caused this exchange began when Dolce & Gabbana published a series of promotional videos for its “Great Show”