I can’t see how they thought, even for a split second, that this would fly.
File under: no such thing as bad publicity. Controversy = free advertising.
Let’s pretend this wasn’t related at all to blackface - that it wasn’t a thing. The whole design looks stupid as fuck and certainly not the high end glamorous brand Gucci presents itself as. It looks like some gimmicky idea you would see at one of those stores that caters to preteen/early teen girls. You know, next to unicorn pajamas and the like, a turtleneck with lips on it.
But you would think that a bunch of high end fashion designers would be educated enough to see what a misstep this was before it left the sketch book phase. Are foreign designers this clueless?
If the idea came from Italy, maybe the different cultural implication weren’t so strong.
For instance this was a wildly succesful ad for liquorice tabs that are still made in Italy and the dispensers are still based on this image.
Actually some eyebrows were raised for thier chewing gum brand “Air Action”.
In Italy blackface was rare, I remember the comedy “Totò truffa” and some few others.
They misspelled “taboo.”
shrug They’re not from an English-speaking country. They think YOU spell “tabu” wrong ^^’.
Can we get Gucci to make a hair gel called Gucci Gucci Goo?
Mr. Popo is already like every racial stereotype rolled into a single character. It’s pretty hard to make him any worse.
I shudder to think that this could be accurate. Make a bunch of 20 dollar sweaters, destroy them and write off 890 dollars per sweater. Sounds like an accountant’s dream.
They’d write off the $20. Which just decreases their profit $20, so they’re saving the taxes on $20. You’ve still lost money when you write it off.
Is it wrong that I find the price just as offensive as the design? I mean $890 for a fucking sweater? I don’t care who designed it, that is a ripoff that could only appeal to someone with so much money that they have to find creative ways to spend it. A big part of what’s wrong with the world is that the $890 sweater is a thing that people will actually purchase.
You’re right. This scene is way better without blackface.
GASP! It’s almost like you don’t trust them or something.
Alternatively, either accidental or intentional, fuck Gucci.
That seems to happen quite often across a number of creative industries. Sometimes they are isolated in what they are doing and they need someone from the outside to say, “You know…”
However in this instance, I’m more inclined to follow Rob’s take on the situation, and assume active intent.
Agreed. However, was the amount lost less than the cost of an ad campaign? As has been said above, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”
The people who already buy Gucci will mostly still buy Gucci.
The people who don’t buy Gucci – that hear about this – either will continue to not buy Gucci (so nothing lost), or might start to show support because they either a) think Gucci is a victim suffering PC backlash over something that is “no big deal”, or b) this action aligns perfectly with their personal moral values, “Fuck yeah! I wouldn’t normally buy Gucci, but I’d buy that!”
So if it was planned to take advantage of the way the world is today, the money lost is minimal vs the potential gains.
I’ve never bought anything made by Gucci in my life, so me boycotting them does nothing. If people who have bought Gucci start publicly burning their shit and never bought anything from them again, that might be something that hurts them.
In the meantime, at the moment, they are a corporation with a lot of money. so they will fuck about however they please.
As weird as the design is, there’s literally a rainbow of colors they could have used to avoid the Blackface connotation. Red, blue, green, maybe not yellow…
Cute.
But the margins on haute couture make the 30% margins on Apple products look like bargains. The suckers who open their wallets for the latest fashions are paying for some cocky airhead’s shareholders’ spoiled brats’ trust-fund. By all means, rack up debt buying the latest thing off the runway two years before it’s being sold in thrift shops, but at least be honest about where that money is going. It sure isn’t going to the sweat shops where brown people mortgage their chance at old age to make blackface sweaters in ecologically obscene packaging that costs a quarter as much to make as the clothes all for vapid tools credulous enough to think fashionistas are job-creators.
(Yes, I know, I was making a joke.)
This. Gucci is italian. The US isn’t the moral compass of the rest of the planet. Blackface isn’t a sensitive topic in many european countries as it is in the USA (where it is a problem, and rightly so).
e.g.:
I coulda used that a few days ago when the windchill was -40. Made do with a necktube stretched around my head. Not Gucci, it is Columbia Sportswear, whose motto is “Tough Mother”.
