DOLCE & GABBANA AD (WITH CHOPSTICKS)

PROVOKES PUBLIC OUTRAGE IN CHINA.

DECEMBER 1, 2018 7:00 AM ET / YUHAN XU

Despite its persistent rural poverty, China is a country of new
wealth. And of ancient traditions. And as international brands
seek to make money off of China, sometimes things go awry.
In mid-November, Dolce & Gabbana, the Italian luxury fashion
brand, launched three short videos on the Chinese social media
network Weibo to promote its upcoming Shanghai runway
extravaganza, dubbed "The Great Show," on Nov. 21.

The videos feature an Asian woman in a lavish Dolce &

Gabbana dress attempting to eat pizza, spaghetti and cannoli.
With Chinese folk music playing in the background, a
Mandarin-speaking voice-over kicks in:

"Welcome to the first episode of 'Eating with Chopsticks' by

Dolce & Gabbana" — pronounced incorrectly on purpose in a
way that mocks Chinese speech. The male voice proceeds to
mansplain how to "properly" eat the dishes. "Is it too big for
you?" mocks the voiceover when the woman doesn't know what
to do with the gigantic cannoli. "Let's use these small stick-like
things to eat our great pizza margherita," he instructs in another
video.

"That's explicit racism," one person commented on Weibo.

"D&G's stereotyping China. [The videos] only show the brand's
outdated view about China." Some believe boycotting the
brand is necessary. "If we don't kick D&G out of China now,
there will be many other foreign brands trampling on our
Chinese dignity!" said an angry netizen.

D&G removed the viral videos from Chinese social media

within 24 hours of posting them. The drama was not over yet,
though. Just hours before the show, a fashion blogger shared a
screenshot of an alleged chat between designer Stefano
Gabbana and an Instagram user in which designer Gabbana
appeared to call China a "country of [five poop emojis]" and
"ignorant dirty smelling mafia." The screenshot went viral in
China, along with the trending hashtag #boycottdolce. Within
two hours, hundreds of Chinese actors and models who were to
walk the runway that evening had withdrawn. D&G's Chinese
brand ambassador, boy band star Wang Junkai, terminated his
deal with D&G.

Gabbana later wrote on Instagram that his account had been

hacked — though his history of offensive comments meant his
excuse was viewed with skepticism. An apology was also
posted on D&G's official account, saying both accounts had
been hacked and "we have nothing but respect for China and
the people of China."

It seemed the apologies came too late. That afternoon, D&G

announced that the Nov. 21 show was canceled. Posts with the
Weibo hashtag #DGTheGreatShowCancelled have been read
870 million times.

Xinhua News Agency, China's state-run media outlet, asked

foreign brands to respect the Chinese market. Chinese people in
Italy appeared at the brand's flagship shop in Milan, protesting
and demanding refunds. China's e-commerce giants, Alibaba
and JD.com, removed D&G products from their online stores.
Hong Kong retailer Lane Crawford also halted the sale of D&G
goods, both in stores and online, after customers started
returning them. A McKinsey report shows that Chinese
consumers make up a third of the global luxury market. D&G
has 58 stores in China; it's unclear how much damage this
incident will do to the brand.

Knowing that they "hurt the feelings of the Chinese" — a well-

worn phrase often invoked by Chinese authorities when the
country has been wronged — Domenico Dolce and Gabbana
released a video on Nov. 23 in which they express their love for
China and say "sorry" in Mandarin.

Although China is the wounded party this time, the nation often
turns a blind eye to racism. Some Chinese people call those
with African heritage "hei gui" ("black ghost") and label
Indians "a san" ("the third"), a derogatory term in the Shanghai
dialect.

In 2016, a Chinese detergent commercial featured a black man

being thrown into washing machine and emerging as a Chinese
man with fair skin. This met little resistance from the Chinese
audience when it aired, and when foreign media outlets
criticized the ad, the company was defensive. In the end,
however, the controversial commercial was pulled.
Source: March 6, 2019, 10:00 PM PST / Robert Williams.

From the red carpets of Hollywood award shows to the

catwalks of Paris and Milan, where throngs of photographers
chase Instagram-worthy shots of actors, pop stars, and style
bloggers sporting the latest look, winter is the season when
Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Versace, and other luxury brands make a
big business of being in the spotlight.

One name has been notably absent from this year’s

glamour parade: Dolce & Gabbana. The iconic Italian brand is
still struggling to overcome a backlash that erupted in
November over a tone-deaf marketing video and derogatory
comments from co-founder Stefano Gabbana about the
Chinese. What’s followed is a boycott on the mainland that
threatens to snuff out one of fashion’s biggest names.

Online retailers such as Alibaba’s TMall and JD.com Inc. still

haven’t reintroduced Dolce & Gabbana on their Chinese sites;
Lane Crawford and other high-end department stores pulled the
brand’s wares from their stores on the mainland; and the spring
issues of influential local magazines like V O G U E
C H IN A feature no D&G ads or products.

The damage hasn’t been limited to China. At both the

Golden Globes and the Oscars, where in previous years Sarah
Jessica Parker, Scarlett Johansson, and other top talent stepped
out in opulent Dolce & Gabbana gowns, no A-lister dared to
risk alienating fans by donning the label. “They basically
offended an entire country,” says Leaf Greener, a stylist and
fashion consultant based in Shanghai and Paris. “Who wants to
associate with that?”

With Chinese shoppers estimated to account for at least a

third of luxury sales and two-thirds of the industry’s growth, the
enduring controversy in this key market may pose an existential
threat to closely held Dolce & Gabbana. The company doesn’t
disclose sales, but an Italian filing showed revenue of €1.3
billion ($1.47 billion) for the year ended March 2018, roughly
twice the haul of rival Versace SpA.

Gabbana and his partner Domenico Dolce founded the

brand in 1985 with a unique Italian blend—look-at-me dresses
bursting with leopard prints and embroidered flowers, skimpy
men’s underwear, and advertising campaigns that celebrated a
cartoonish version of their country: shouting families, nuns, and
sexed-up ingénues arranged in kitschy restaurants, or Sicilian
street scenes that looked straight out of T H E G O D F A T H E R .

The duo has weathered—and even seemed to relish—previous

controversies. In 2017, Gabbana punched back at detractors of
its “Thin & Gorgeous” sneakers as “fat and full of cholesterol.”
The company even sold its own $245 “#Boycott D&G” T-shirts
to lambaste Americans who denounced it for dressing first lady
Melania Trump, a longtime fan. The pair did have to walk back
remarks they made criticizing gay families to an Italian
magazine in 2015, but that damage pales in comparison with
the China meltdown. “It’s gotten political now,” Greener says.
“I don’t think people are going to forget.”

Before a planned November runway show in Shanghai,

Dolce & Gabbana posted a series of videos featuring a Chinese
model awkwardly attempting to eat cannoli, pizza, and other
Italian foods with chopsticks. The videos alone might have
been forgiven as a crude joke made by a company known for
poking fun at its own culture, but leaked messages by Gabbana
insulting Chinese people and defending the video provoked a
social media firestorm. Making matters worse, the company
initially claimed it had been hacked and took days to remove
the videos from its Instagram accounts and apologize. Amid the
uproar, it was forced to hastily postpone the show.

Three months later, “I still am not seeing anyone wear

Dolce,” says Bryanboy, a Filipino fashion influencer and style
blogger. While Burberry, Gucci, and Prada have also faced
anger for releasing products seen as crude or culturally
insensitive, those brands responded quickly to quell any
controversy. “This was on another level,” Bryanboy says.
 At Dolce & Gabbana’s February show in Milan, the front
row was missing names like Stevie Wonder and Monica
Bellucci, who’ve graced previous shows. V O G U E C H IN A ’s
editor-in-chief, Angelica Cheung, also sat out the event, as did
many of the bloggers, stylists, and top models, whose online
followers are key to attracting buyers for a collection. As a
result, the show garnered only about $4.2 million worth of
exposure on social media and in the press, vs. $12.2 million the
year before, estimates fashion consultant Launchmetrics. The
number of articles and posts about the show fell to a tenth of
their previous level.
“The influencer economy is so powerful, and they are
increasingly demanding that brands reflect their lifestyle and
values,” says Elspeth Cheung, a brand valuation director at
Kantar Millward Brown’s BrandZ unit. Cheung says young
Chinese shoppers have become more and more proud of their
country’s recent prosperity. “Brands need to make sure that
their communication either supports or at least doesn’t go
against the China dream,” she says.

In the scandal’s wake, social media comments have

quipped that D&G now stands for “Dead and Gone.” With the
brand still absent from key wholesalers, e-commerce, and
magazines in China, the misstep has become the luxury
industry’s most notorious incident since Christian Dior designer
John Galliano was filmed delivering an anti-Semitic rant in a
Paris bar in 2012. Dior quickly fired Galliano and replaced him
with another designer, but the way out for Dolce & Gabbana is
less clear—Gabbana’s name is on the door, and he owns half of
the company. On a recent Sunday in Beijing, some shoppers
had returned to the Dolce & Gabbana corner at the SKP luxury
mall. While a few said they didn’t care about the scandal, most
of their peers preferred to line up to enter the nearby shops of
rivals Louis Vuitton and Gucci.

Xia Li, a 40-year-old entrepreneur, says some Chinese

customers will return to the brand once the memory of the
incident fades, but she hopes the majority will resist: “They’re
not insulting us and making profits from us at the same
time.” —

C H IN E S E W E B U S E R S H A V E S H U N N E D D O L C E &
G A B B A N A S I N C E I T S R A C IS M C O N T R O V E R S Y

Marc Bain / July 19 2019

Dolce & Gabbana found itself mired in a PR nightmare last

November when it was accused of racism in China. The
situation started with a marketing campaign that many felt
repeated outdated Chinese stereotypes. But the gaffe turned into
a full-blown crisis because of derogatory comments about
Chinese people posted on the Instagram account of brand
cofounder Stefano Gabbana during an argument with another
Instagram user. (Gabbana claimed his account was hacked and
he didn’t make the comments, and the brand apologized.)
As the New York Times has reported, many Western celebrities
since seem to have forgotten the incident and embraced the
brand again. But the same does not appear to be happening in
China, according to a new report by L2, a digital intelligence
firm. That’s significant because Chinese shoppers are presently
the world’s biggest buyers of luxury, and China is a key part of
the important Asia-Pacific market for Dolce & Gabbana.
Whether or not it has been able to recover Chinese shoppers’
esteem has real consequences for its business.

L2 found that in the first quarter of 2019, Dolce & Gabbana’s

Chinese social-media engagement—measured as a mix of likes,
comments, and shares—was down 98% from the same period
last year. The firm looked at Weibo in particular, the largest
microblogging site in the country with more than 460 million
active users. It’s a top place for people such as influencers, or
KOLs as they’re known in China (meaning key opinion
leaders), to build and reach a large audience, and it’s an
important channel for brands.

The data comes with one caveat: Dolce & Gabbana stopped
posting on Weibo for a time, so engagement would naturally
fall during that period. But even since it resumed posting
occasionally in March, it’s been unable to get China’s web
users as engaged as before the racism controversy, and the
comments it receives are generally not positive. “The top
upvoted comment on their most recent post is ‘Haven’t you
died yet?'” notes Liz Flora, L2’s editor for Asia-Pacific
research.
 Dolce & Gabbana has lost the Chinese brand
ambassadors who once spread its name but now either don’t
want to work with it or fear the criticism they might face if they
did. The country has a powerful online cancel culture. When
actress Charmaine Sheh simply liked a Dolce & Gabbana post
on Instagram, which isn’t even available in China, it added fuel
to a social-media backlash against her. Dolce & Gabbana’s lone
post featuring a celebrity since the crisis was for a Hong Kong
store opening that featured Hong Kong model Gaile Lok, who
L2 notes has only about 150,000 Weibo followers.

“Being shunned by Chinese celebrities is a kiss of death for a

brand’s social media presence in China,” Flora says. “If a
luxury brand can’t get celebrities to work with it in the market,
it’s almost like it doesn’t exist.” She points out that her firm, in
its recent report on luxury in China, found that content featuring
celebrities drove 94% of all engagement in the fashion and
watches and jewelry categories.
Online engagement isn’t the same as sales, but it’s hard to sell
when online shops won’t carry your products. After the incident
last year, numerous online retailers in China dropped the label.
It appears they still haven’t brought it back. “Searches for the
brand on Tmall, JD.com, and VIP.com bring up error messages,
and the China sites for Yoox and Net-a-Porter do the same for
its Chinese name,” L2 said.

###