Is The "D&G Incident" In Fashion Industry Accidental?

Recently, the three luxury brands of Gucci, Prada and Burberry cooperated with each other to set up the "Advisory Committee on promoting diversity and inclusiveness". The brands indicated that the ad hoc committee was used to build multicultural projects to enhance brand culture sensitivity and inclusiveness.

This move has been praised by social media.

Luxury industry has paid an expensive tuition fee for the frequent "discrimination storm".

Besides the two dimensions of design and sales, luxury brands have to take the understanding and tolerance of multiculturalism into consideration.

The negative disturbance caused by cultural appropriation is called the black swan event in the luxury industry. An inadvertent and negative fuse is likely to trigger the trust crisis of the brand in a comprehensive way. For this reason, luxury brands have to "be careful".

According to the Cultura Appropriation and theArts published by the philosopher James O. Young in 2008, the definition of cultural appropriation is "the phenomenon that a single person or another cultural group has adopted, embezzled, plagiarized and copied a culture without permission."

In the second half of 2018, luxury brands, led by Dolce&Gabbana, plunged into a series of "discrimination storms".

The D&G incident is, in the final analysis, a brand crisis triggered by cultural appropriation.

In November 2018, Dolce&Gabbana, a luxury brand in Italy, took up the advertising video of Shanghai's large-scale fashion show. It was misunderstood by Chinese people because of misreading the culture of Chinese traditional chopsticks. After that, Dolce&Gabbana designers openly expressed insult to China in social media, causing a great stir in China.

Subsequently, the Dolce&Gabbana Shanghai show was forced to be cancelled. Although the founder of the Dolce&Gabbana apologized publicly after the incident, discrimination was not stopped.

A number of luxury business platform Dolce&Gabbana products, 2019 autumn and winter fashion week in Milan, once in China's Dolce&Gabbana fashion show, this has also become a "cold palace", no domestic fashion media coverage of this show.

However, the cost of Dolce&Gabbana does not seem to have taught other luxury brands a lesson.

The western world's colonization of exotic has led to many similar problems.

Coincidentally, in December 2018, Prada was also caught up in cultural discrimination.

Prada's latest Otto cartoon image product, black face and thick red lips, is a feature of African culture. However, its appropriation in product design is intended to make black race inhuman, and it is suspected of racial discrimination.

Subsequently, the Prada BlackFace discrimination incident caused a uproar in Facebook, and people began to independently pmit posts with #BoycottPrada (resist Prada) tags.

Subsequently, Prada made a public statement and released all relevant products.

In 2019, during the Spring Festival in China, Gucci was caught in a wave of discrimination and suffered the same cultural controversy with Prada.

The reason is that Gucci recently released a black face and a red Lipper sweater, which is also considered black race discrimination.

The 8 billion euro Gucci won't wait for the crisis to happen. The first Gucci CEO first apologized, and the disputed goods were disputed.

In 2019, it was called the "cultural crisis" in the first year of luxury brand.

It is not only about racial discrimination, but also lack of in-depth understanding of the cultural characteristics of different countries and regions.

Over the past two years, Burberry has suffered from cultural acclimatization.

The cover of Chinese Spring Festival advertisement, which was photographed by Burberry, was tucked out by Chinese netizens because of the lack of new year's joyful atmosphere. Burberry was accused of being "disagreeable" to creativity and disconnected from traditional Chinese culture and aesthetics.

And the lack of sensitivity to social topics is controversial.

Burberry released the lasso sweater in London Fashion Week, the social media's "suicide Hoodie", which refers to the values of beautifying, promoting suicide and death penalty.

For audiences with different cultural backgrounds, luxury brands lack the sensitivity of negative associations in product design. Even when Burberry apologizes to RichardTisci, the chief creative officer, he also claims that there is not enough controversy in design.

However, some people in the industry have raised such questions: whether it is Dolce&Gabbana racial discrimination or the Gucci black faced sweater, are there any controversy about whether the brand side is lying on the gun or is it intended to attract the public eye?

Why are cultural conflicts frequent in the luxury industry?

The pattern of luxury industry is constantly changing.

With the rise of social media and youth consumption, luxury brands have long been on the top of attention Pyramid.

Under such circumstances, luxury brands have begun to shoulder greater social responsibilities in addition to their roles.

In other words, to some extent, today's luxury industry has been kidnapped by many netizens' morality and has been put into the "moral commanding heights".

Last week, a well-known American Commentary website, Salon, published an article that read: "luxury industry is blind to many things in order to publicize brand choice." in this era of our life, luxury brands need to know what kind of social responsibilities they should fulfill, what brand image they should display, rather than "unintentionally" to promote their products through race or other social sensitive topics.

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Nowadays, luxury goods industry is running faster and faster, and products are constantly upgrading and iterating.

However, how a global brand can better achieve cultural diversity, successfully rooted in the cultural soil of different regions, and win the local audience, is the lack of long-term consideration of most luxury brands.

Although fashion insiders and commentators all agree that brand management has become a promotional business, the industry believes that cultural disputes and discrimination are not intentional.

Gucci, the fastest growing luxury brand in recent years, shows that it has entered the 8 billion euro club in the fourth quarter of 2018. The income of luxury sector has increased by more than 20% in 8 consecutive quarters. If Gucci is a controversial topic of race deliberately created, it is nothing more than a big hot brand that does not lack a topic.

DinaFierro, a digital media veteran, said on Twetter: "rather than brand is deliberately controversial, it is easier for fashion brands to ignore some cultural sensibilities."

New York Times luxury brand and Fashion Journalist ElizabethPaton said, "luxury brands are not good at portraying their public image, so we can always see some repeated mistakes in luxury brands."

With the rise of the millennial generation, the luxury industry has been accelerating "younger" in order to adapt to market changes.

In order to attract younger consumers and gain more room for growth, the boundary between luxury brands and street brands is becoming more and more blurred. The traditional luxury style has been gradually weakened, and the label of young people buying has been gradually weakened. Hip-hop culture, rebellion, darkness, niche and street are constantly being enlarged.

It is the appearance of Burberry's "suicidal Hoodie" in the London show, or the unique sweater of Gucci's red lips modelling. Its original intention may be to cater for the young people's niche elements and create a young label accessory product.

But while blindly catering to the younger strategy, the brand ignores the sensitivity of some social topics.

Although a special or even taboo topic can get a lot of traffic and attention in a short time, the social impact caused by the topic is a factor that enterprises must take into account.

The concept of luxury has been redefined. Luxury is no longer a consumer product for this society.

At the moment, the values and aesthetic values conveyed by luxury industries will affect countless people.

According to McKinsey, race diversification will bring more business returns to the company.

In the first quarter of the cultural diversity, the company's financial return is higher than the median of their respective industries by up to 35%.

Under such a trend, the new battlefield of luxury industry has emerged. Maintaining and respecting cultural diversity will become a new competitive advantage.

However, the most challenging thing is how creative directors can balance sales and social responsibilities under high pressure operation, and how to make the most meaningful voice to the world while the brand socialization marketing is going on, or the biggest challenge facing the industry.