Dolce & Gabbana Cancelled Shanghai Show Over Racist Comments

Update: According to the South China Morning Post, Stefano Gabbana and Domenico Dolce have issued a video in which they apologise to "Chinese people worldwide" for 'misunderstanding Chinese culture.'

“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 ends with the designers saying the word 'sorry' in Mandarin.

The video follows widespread backlash against the duo, with protestors congregating outside the brand's stores holding signs reading the phrase 'Not Me' to show their anger.

Now, too, Net-A-Porter has dropped the brand and criticism has mounted further as high-profile Chinese celebrities have terminated contracts and denounced the pair. Can Dolce & Gabbana recover from this?

This story was originally published on 21st November 2018.

On Wednesday, Dolce & Gabbana was forced to abruptly cancel plans for a multimillion dollar, one-hour runway show in Shanghai, China – after designer Stefano Gabbana allegedly posted racist remarks on his personal Instagram, causing China's biggest celebrities to pull out of attending the show, WWD is reporting.

Diet Prada, the fashion industry's watchdog Instagram account, caught the since-deleted posts in which Gabbana appears to say “From now on in all the interview [sp] that I will do international I will say that the country of [series of poop emojis] is China” and “China Ignorant Dirty Smelling Mafia,” the trade paper noted.

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As @dolcegabbana prepares to mount their next runway show in Shanghai this coming evening (7:30PM) and the rest of Instagram fawns over what’s sure to be an overly lavish “love letter” to China, we’ll be wondering if we’ll see chopsticks as hair ornaments, take-out boxes as purses, or even kimonos misappropriated as Chinese costume. Time will tell. For now, we’ll let y’all simmer on this DM between Stefano and Dieter @michaelatranova (chronology is reversed in slides). Word has it that they’re still in the process of model casting (over 200 Asian girls scheduled)...wouldn’t let them walk the show if we were their agents lol. Also, curious what the Chinese government will think of their country being called shit basically...especially considering how strict they are on who to allow to enter the country on work visas based on a thorough social media background checks. • #DGTheGreatShow #DGlovesChina #runway #fashionshow #cancelled #racism #dolceandgabbana #altamoda #rtw #dgmillennials #stefanogabbana #shanghai #chinese #china #wtf #dumb #lame #asianmodel #asian #dietprada

A post shared by Diet Prada ™ (@diet_prada) on Nov 20, 2018 at 7:05pm PST

Both Gabbana and the brand have each posted apologies on their respective accounts claiming the designer was hacked. "My Instagram account has been hacked. My legal office is working on this. I love China and the Chinese Culture. I’m so sorry for what happened," Gabbana wrote on his personal page. “Our Instagram account has been hacked. So has the account of Stefano Gabbana," the Italian fashion house posted on Wednesday. "Our legal office is urgently investigating. We are very sorry for any distress caused by these unauthorised posts. We have nothing but respect for China and the people of China."

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#DGlovesChina ? More like #DGdesperateforthatChineseRMB lol. In a bid to further appeal to luxury's covetable Chinese consumers, @dolcegabbana released some hella offensive “instructional” videos on the usage of chopsticks. Pandering at it's 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. Dolce & Gabbana have already removed the videos from their Chinese social media channels, but not Instagram. Stefano Gabbana has been on a much-needed social media cleanse (up until November 2nd), so maybe he kept himself busy by meddling with the marketing department for this series. Who wants to bet the XL cannoli “size” innuendos were his idea? Lmao. • #dolceandgabbana #altamoda #rtw #dgmillennials #stefanogabbana #shanghai #chinese #italian #cannoli #meme #wtf #dumb #lame #chopsticks #foodie #tutorial #cuisine #italianfood #asianmodel #asian #chinesefood #dietprada

A post shared by Diet Prada ™ (@diet_prada) on Nov 19, 2018 at 6:39am PST

The issue here is that the debacle stemmed from a series of social media posts teasing the runway show, in which an Asian model attempts to eat various Italian foods with a pair of chopsticks. The videos were hashtagged #DGLovesChina. According to Jing Daily, a site dedicated to reporting on China's luxury market, the videos depicted Chinese culture in an outdated and racist way. The posts drew such criticism so quickly, the fashion label deleted them from its Weibo (a Chinese social platform) but they remain on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, according to WWD.

This isn't the first time Dolce & Gabbana has come under fire for controversial opinions. Gabbana has publicly and very proudly supported Melania Trump, chastising detractors with a #Boycott T-shirt, and then there was that time the brand tried to sell a "slave sandal" for £2,395.

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