The Asian market hates it

This Italian fashion house has spent a literal fortune on their ad campaign this year and thought by bringing in all the big Hollywood names that it would be a success.

The Asian market hates it though and that is where the vast majority of sales come from.

Dolce & Gabbana

China

Three years after ad controversy, D&G is still struggling to win back China

Chinese consumers have neither forgiven nor forgotten Dolce & Gabbana.
Almost three years after the luxury fashion brand was dragged into a race row over a series of controversial ads — and offensive private messages allegedly sent from co-founder Stefano Gabbana’s Instagram account in response — D&G appears to still be a label non grata on Chinese social media.

Over the weekend, Hong Kong pop singer Karen Mok came under fire on social media for wearing a D&G cloak in the music video for her new song, “A Woman for All Seasons.” The backlash was swift, with a hashtag about the incident viewed 490 million times on Chinese microblogging site Weibo as of Thursday.

“We apologize and hope to be forgiven by the public,” the statement read. The music video has since been purged the from the studio’s official channels. “I am truly sorry for being reckless this time. I have no excuse. My team and myself are definitely in the wrong here,” Mok later told reporters.

The backlash only added to D&G’s woes in mainland China, where a series of controversial promotional videos released in 2018 continue to affect the brand’s reputation. The ads, which were posted ahead of a Shanghai fashion show, depicted a Chinese model struggling to eat pizza, cannoli and pasta with chopsticks.

Set to a soundtrack of stereotypical Chinese music, the videos featured a patronizing Mandarin voiceover instructing her how to eat the Italian dishes. At the time, D&G apologized for the videos, and said they were “unauthorized” posts. But the ads were berated online by many social media users as racist and disrespectful of Chinese culture.

The fallout from the 2018 incident was immediate. Social media users filmed themselves destroying D&G products and mentions of the brand surged by 2,512% on Weibo, according to a report by research firm Gartner. The brand’s Shanghai fashion show was canceled just days later, and its products were pulled from Chinese ecommerce sites. Gartner reported that D&G went completely dark on Weibo for over three months.

Chinese models and celebrities, including popstar Karry Wang, terminated their contracts with D&G en masse, while “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” actress Zhang Ziyi said via her studio that she would never buy or wear the brand again. Hong Kong actress Charmaine Sheh was later criticized online for simply liking one of the brand’s Instagram posts. Zuo Ye, the model who starred in D&G’s controversial 2018 videos, meanwhile said that her career had almost been ruined and that she, her family and her agent had “received lots of attacks and threats online.” – Source