A case of foot-in-mouth disease

LIKE many bad ideas, it started innocuously enough. In late November, Dolce & Gabbana uploaded a series of videos on its social media platforms that starred a young Chinese woman wearing a red sequin dress. She was seen struggling to eat a variety of Italian dishes using her chopsticks. Meanwhile, in the voiceover, a man could be heard dishing out patronising instructions on the usage of the utensils alongside sexual innuendoes - was the Italian cannoli too large for the Chinese to manage? In an added insult to the Middle Kingdom, he mispronounced the name of the luxury label, poking fun at the lack of cosmopolitan awareness of the world's latest arriviste power.

The three films were intended to publicise what was to have been the fashion giant's biggest show in Shanghai ever. Instead, all they achieved was to ruffle the feathers of the very audience to which they were supposed to appeal. As public backlash grew, the tone-deaf commercials were pulled from the company's Weibo account. But things started to turn truly malicious when its co-founder Stefano Gabbana responded on Instagram to a blogger's complaint with a quintet of faeces emojis and the words "China Ignorant Dirty Smelling Mafia" to describe the country and its people.

"The Great Show" was cancelled amid the calls for a catwalk boycott, while retailers - in China and across the world - pulled Dolce & Gabbana products off their shelves. An overdue apology arrived after a ham-fisted claim that Gabbana's photo-sharing account had been hacked failed to work, but by then it was too little, too late. The online fashion business website WWD has estimated that the controversy could potentially cost the brand 400 million euros (S$623 million) in lost sales in China alone.