Dolce & Gabbana’s latest campaign has been slammed for racism

Again.

UPDATE: Following the controversy, Dolce & Gabbana’s The Great Show has been cancelled. For everything, you need to know about what went down in the last 24hours, click here.

Dolce & Gabbana has already copped its fair share of controversy this year, but it seems like that trend is showing no signs of slowing down.

Ahead of its ‘Great Fashion Show’ in Shanghai, the brand has released a three-part series which many have dubbed racist and offensive to Chinese people. Eating With Chopsticks features an Asian model trying – and failing – to eat Italian food with chopsticks (including spaghetti, pizza and oversized cannoli). A narrator instructs her in Chinese while she fails each attempt.

Diet Prada called out the campaign on Instagram, citing it as ‘hella offensive’ and pandering to ‘tired and false stereotypes’. Many others have since commented on the video, leading to its removal from Chinese social media platform Weibo. At time of writing, the campaign remains on Instagram and Facebook.

You can check out Diet Prada’s take on the controversy below (with added English subtitles), or read on to see Stefano Gabbana’s alleged wild (and even more offensive) reaction to the controversy via DM (also reposted by Diet Prada).

 

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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

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

 

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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. Will we see chopsticks as hair ornaments? Take-out boxes as purses? 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