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What is the magnitude of this scandal to be compared to? The observers – most of whom claimed not to be ” especially not “ named – sometimes evoke the explosion of the dismissal, in 2011, of John Galliano by Dior after the broadcast of a video where we heard the designer uttering anti-Semitic insults in a Parisian bar. Brief, “an episode that will teach”, we agree. It opposes two duos at the antipodes.
On the one hand, the one formed by Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana. In 1985, the two designers joined their names to found a fashion brand (which today exceeds one billion euros in annual turnover), inspired by a certain sexy Italian iconography: Sicilian widows, callipyge beauties, footballers tanned, slicked back little machos. On the other, the tandem made up of Americans Tony Liu and Lindsey Schuyler. After meeting at a New York milliner’s, these two fashion-loving friends launched Diet Prada, an Instagram account currently followed by 3.4 million subscribers, in December 2014.
Between the two parties, the tensions were such that, in 2019, the stylists sued the bloggers (whose business consisted of exposing the failings of the industry in terms of plagiarism or cultural appropriation) before a Milan court. . Dolce & Gabbana’s complaint for “serious and repeated defamatory conduct” is 47 pages long. Amount claimed: more than 665 million dollars (nearly 591 million euros)! The designers have only mentioned their opponents in the press once, in 2021, with the FinancialTimes : “Do they think they are Buddha? Jesus? No one has the right to judge someone else without worrying about the consequences of their actions. »
A flurry of comments
To understand this war, you have to go back to November 19, 2018. On that day, Dolce & Gabbana published videos (#dgloveschina), as an appetizer before the show scheduled for Shanghai, two days later. The event, with 300 models and 1,500 guests, should propel the Italian label into the lucrative Chinese market. As soon as they were published, however, the videos caused a scandal: we see the model Zuo Ye cut and catch with great difficulty, using chopsticks, a pizza, spaghetti or a cannolo, with, in voice-over, the commentary lustful in a male voice: “It’s really too big for you, isn’t it?” »
Online, a deluge of comments judge these teasers indigent, even racist. “Dolce and Gabbana have built their imagination on a caricatural representation of Italy, desirable, ironic and idealized, as if taken from a Bertolucci filmrecalls the semiotician and consultant Luca Marchetti. But, when one enters into an intercultural dialogue, this same stereotyped approach becomes dangerous. »
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