• Dolce & Gabbana accused of racism: the fashion show in China was canceled
  • Dolce & Gabbana and stereotypes about China. The "revenge of Beijing" is immediate. Banned products

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11 August 2019To apologize to the Chinese customers after the gaffe of the t-shirts that do not attribute Hong Kong and Macao to China, the Italian fashion brand has also fielded the designer, Donatella Versace.

"I am deeply sorry for the unfortunate recent horror committed by our Company and which is currently being discussed on various social media channels," Donatella Versace wrote in a statement, also republished on the Facebook page of the fashion house. "I never wanted - he added - to lack respect for the Chinese National Sovereignty and this is why I wanted to ask personally apologize for this inaccuracy and for any inconvenience it may have caused". The combined apology of the brand and its most representative personality came after the company put on sale t-shirts and sweatshirts that aroused the fury of the Chinese netisers.

On $ 380 t-shirts and sweatshirts each are names of cities of the world in which they can be sold, with the country in which these cities are located. For example: "Milan-ITALY" or "Berlin-GERMANY". There are also Chinese cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, rightly located in China. But when it comes to the former British colony and the former Portuguese colony, the inscriptions are "Hong Kong-HONG KONG" and "Macau-MACAO".

Immediately the photos of the items of clothing in question circulated on Chinese social media, moreover at a time of high tension around Hong Kong, crossed for three months by pro-democracy demonstrations that aroused Beijing's fury, which it suspects that behind these demonstrations there are foreign hands.

One of the first effects of Versace's gaffe was the loss of the most important testimonial, actress Yang Mi, who said that she intends to interrupt the relationship because she is "extremely offended" as a "citizen of the People's Republic of China".

To date the trending hashtag on Weibo, seen over 400 million times, is "Versace suspected of supporting the secession of Hong Kong and Macao", reports the SCMP. The damage is done.

Versace, in a statement posted on the Chinese social network Weibo, for its part presented "profound excuses" and said it had withdrawn the products and destroyed them. "We respect China and resolutely respect the territorial sovereignty of China," the statement said.

Versace's gaffe brings to mind that of Dolce & Gabbana last year, of which a video showed a Chinese model unable to use chopsticks. Later, the situation had been aggravated by the spread of a message exchange in which one of the two designers insulted China. Dolce & Gabbana had to record a video of apologies to China. But the controversy with respect to fashion brands does not concern only Italy. In May of last year the American Gap was targeted and printed on some T-shirts maps of China that did not include Taiwan and most of the South China Sea, claimed by Beijing as its own.