On Friday, the founders of Italian fashion house Dolce & Gabbana apologised to Chinese customers as a row over racially offensive posts snowballed, with its products pulled from lucrative Chinese e-commerce platforms.
Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana capped a 1 minute 30-second mea culpa by saying ‘sorry’ in Mandarin in a video posted on a Chinese social media platform, in an attempt to salvage their reputation in the world’s most important luxury market.
Dolce in Italian said, “Our families always taught us to respect different cultures across the world and because of this we want to ask for your forgiveness if we have made mistakes in interpreting yours.”
And to that Gabbana also added, “We want to say sorry to all Chinese across the world, of which there are many, and we are taking this apology and message very seriously.”
The message was posted on the brand’s official Weibo account, which is the popular Chinese Twitter-like social media platform, where they have close to one million followers.
Earlier this week after the scandal prompted Dolce & Gabbana to cancel a fashion show in Shanghai, the company had to issued a written apology on Weibo.
After Dolce & Gabbana posted short clips on Instagram showing a woman eating pizza, spaghetti and a cannoli with chopsticks that some deemed culturally insensitive, thus giving rise to the controversy.
But the matter caught fire, after screenshots circulated of an Instagram user’s alleged chat with the famously volatile Gabbana, who used five smiling poo emojis to describe China and launched insults at the country and its people.
In defence, the company said its account and that of Stefano Gabbana had been hacked, and that its legal office was investigating the matter.
Though the fashion giant has sought an apology, but its products disappeared from multiple Chinese e-commerce platforms.
A spokeswoman of the retail giant Suning.com said that they have removed all Dolce & Gabbana products after the incident.
Notably, the brands also could not be searched on retail giants Taobao and JD.com.
Still the Chinese netizens were unconvinced by the latest apology, with the video garnering over 100,000 comments some three hours after it was posted.
One Weibo user commented on the apology post, “They’re bowing their precious heads to the renminbi (yuan) then.”
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