4-13. Fashion houses often use edgy ads to promote products. Such edgy campaigns attract attention and can cross the line to cause disrespect in global markets. How can multinational companies ensure advertising content does not antagonize local consumers? On Wednesday, November 21, the WeChat account of the official People’s Daily issued a statement believed to be from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism; the Dolce & Gabbana (D&G) fashion show in Shanghai had been cancelled. The move to cancel the fashion show was due to an outcry over a series of promotional videos posted by D&G titled “Eating with Chopsticks” and subsequent insulting posts made by Stefano Gabbana, the co-founder of the D&G brand, in a private Instagram chat. As a result, the Italian fashion house was forced to withdraw its products from Chinese e-commerce sites amid calls to boycott the brand, possibly eliminating years of brand building in the Chinese market.

The videos, which were posted on Dolce & Gabbana’s website, were promotion for the company’s new campaign D&G Loves China, billed as a Tribute to China. The clips featured a Chinese model dressed in a red sequined D&G dress, giggling as she clumsily used a pair of chopsticks to eat pizza, spaghetti, and traditional Sicilian cannolo. A male voiceover in a rather suggestive tone asks the actress “Is it too big for you?”94 Social media posts on Instagram were quick to label the ads as stereotypical, racist, culturally insensitive, and disrespectful toward Asian females. The three clips were originally posted on Weibo, one of the most popular microblogging websites in China, and were promptly deleted after the outrage over the brand’s social media posts. However, the story did not end there, and Stefano Gabbana went on to defend their actions on Instagram by saying, “the whole world knows that the Chinese eat with chopsticks and westerners with a fork.”