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I don’t think their clientele - at least what I imagine their clientele is - would mind that much.
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Super impressed you looked this up. I love it. Thanks.
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Surprised that Asia-Pacific market is that large. I wonder if that is largely China or all over. Japan itself is no slouch either.
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Still backs up my point that if ~20% of your customers might find this culturally insensitive, you might want to rethink it. I mean every culture had social taboos. When your market is international, you have to be considerate of that.
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Though I will acknowledge if this was designed in Italy, maybe they don’t know/understand. But then again Prada JUST had a similar incident with these monkey looking super expensive collectable things. It gets hard to say they don’t know, and more likely they don’t care.
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The fusion of those two things affected me for sure. It was not long ago we had another story of a fashion brand releasing something that they almost immediately had to pull that left us all wondering how it got past the design stage. Remember this Fendi scarf?
But when we saw that ugly, stupid mess we laughed. At least I did. At any rate I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say that fashion disasters are more often funny than viscerally appalling. With this sweater I didn’t laugh, I think recoiled would be a good word?
The thing is the Fendi scarf came in different colours and I think the whole “I’m being born right now” look was genuinely accidental. With this sweater they meant it. I don’t think they ever would have made that sweater if they weren’t being racist on purpose. I think they think there is a market for that. So I don’t think the aesthetics can be separated from the racism at all. In this case, I think “racist” is the aesthetic.
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I agree. For me it’s more than I know there’s an intersection of aesthetics and ethics, but I lack the artistic trainings to critically evaluate it. Nonetheless, I can and will evaluate the ethics on its own.
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Those using the daylight gui setting might not see the third pointy white hat in that image.
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Italy is a former colonizer of Africa. They generally aren’t naive about race issues. It’s present every-day politicians run on directly-stated anti-immigrant platforms.
Like other countries, Italy has always had problems with racism, racial stereotyping, and mocking racial costuming. Italy had hateful minstrel shows that made fun of Black people in colonies, in the same way that the US had shows directed at US slaves and their descendants.
The most common argument isn’t that they do this stuff accidentally, it’s that the local whiter people don’t complain about it as much as the whiter people might in other countries.
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There was H&M with the monkey hoodie. And before that another Prada subsidiary Miu Miu with holocaust imagery. Before that was Dolce and Gabana with their DGLovesChina campaign. Before that was Givenchy with their Chola Victorian stunt. This is how fashion has chosen to market itself for a few years. They can count on a small backlash initially, then people forget, but they still have the brand in their brain.
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I just assumed they’ve skipped over that lame pointy hat association and gone straight to experts.
I’m wondering if many are seeing
something
in this sweater
that was not intentional, but simply ignorant.
Perhaps the association
seen in this sweater
is invisible to certain types of people.
Some people are making the argument, “Maybe Italians don’t understand what looking racist is.”
They are a super sophisticated global fashion brand.
Alessandro Michele is their creative director.
This do wild things with people’s cultural expectations, on purpose…
They experiment, but they know what things look like, and they know what pushes buttons.
They aren’t accidental in their looks. They made a big public mistake here, but it wasn’t out of ignorance.
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Fair point, I guess. But instead of just going off on how it is a weird design for an upscale fashion company, or commenting how bad it was - I specifically made a point to first acknowledge it evoked blackface imagery, while setting it aside to make the other comment. Then I circled back to say Gucci SHOULD have known better and never had the design leave the sketch book phase. So instead of ignoring it, I did acknowledge it twice.
I honestly feel like I try to acknowledge various view points before making an additional or contrary point, and that just gets filtered out. Maybe it’s just dismissed as “what-about-ism”. But it stems from various therapy sessions where one acknowledges what another has said before presenting their view. (In this case, not a specific person, but the “room”.)
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oh look who’s here to tell us what doesn’t bother white people in europe
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See? Even Gucci can display some class… when absolutely fucking forced to do so!
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Okay. Fair enough.
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