November 23, 2018, 05:36 PM 
Italian fashion house Dolce & Gabbana is feeling the full crushing weight of China’s wrath falling on it.
Its products are being removed from all of China’s major e-commerce platforms, including TMall, JD.com, and Suning, as well as many smaller online outlets.
The trouble started earlier in the week by the company’s “DG Loves China” marketing campaign.
Promotional videos showed an Asian woman attempting to eat a pizza, cannoli, and spaghetti with chopsticks, as D&G was presumably trying to produce a humorous ad that would appeal to Chinese consumers.
But it ended up being criticised in China for being racist due to its patronising concept, the model’s stereotypical look, the voiceover’s condescending tone, and how Shanghai was written in Japanese characters.
In response to criticism from Chinese Internet users that the ads were racist, co-founder Stefano Gabbana escalated the problem into a diatribe, allegedly writing things like “the country of ????? is China” and “China Ignorant Dirty Smelling Mafia” on Instagram.
Gabbana then claimed that his account had been hacked along with D&G's. The Chinese were not convinced.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BqbgvLinF1w/
Chinese celebrities then pulled out from attending the brand’s big-budget fashion show scheduled for Nov. 21 night in Shanghai -- the biggest event in the company’s 33-year history.
Zhang Ziyi, the 39-year-old Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon star, posted the following image onto her Weibo account.
The speech bubble reads: “You dropped your shit, I’m returning it to you.”
Four hours before showtime, Dolce & Gabbana was forced to cancel “The Great Show”.
Gabbana and his co-founder Domenico Dolce then released a statement expressing their regret at the cancellation of the show, but did not apologise for the whole fiasco.
— Dolce & Gabbana (@dolcegabbana) November 21, 2018
People in China then started posting, putting and holding up “Not Me” signs outside of Dolce & Gabbana locations, sarcastically mirroring Gabbana’s Instagram post in which he claimed to have been hacked.
Two days after the crisis hit catastrophic levels, Dolce and Gabbana issued an apology on Weibo, China’s most-used digital platform.
Dolce said: “We have always loved China. We have visited China many times and with each visit, we fall deeper in love with the Chinese culture. But of course, there is still a lot to learn. With regards to the earlier mistake we made, we are deeply sorry.”
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