Fiery and impulsive, Stefano Gabbana is as well known for his temper as he is for his beautiful dresses but last week he took things too far when in a private chat he called Chinese people dog eaters and “ignorant dirty smelling Mafia” just hours before the start of a Shanghai runway show after there was much controversy over a Dolce & Gabbana advert of a Chinese woman trying to eat Italian food with chopsticks.

When the chat was made public, the fallout was catastrophic. Not only did the Cultural Affairs Bureau of Shanghai rightfully cancel the show but the Chinese public went wild with many uploading photos of themselves burning their D&G pieces.

In the aftermath, Stefano first said that his account had been hacked and then both he and Domenico Dolce issued a very public recorded apology but the damage had been done. There was little question about whether or not he had actually been hacked because well, this wasn’t Gabbana’s first rodeo. This year alone he called much-loved singer and actress Selena Gomez ugly and uber-star blogger Chiara Ferragni’s Dior wedding dress cheap. The latter was particularly quick to join the Chinese disaster mud-slinging by writing one single word on the Instagram account that leaked the story: Karma.

You would have thought that Gabbana would have learnt from the morality play that was John Galliano’s dismissal from Dior in 2011 after his drunken anti-Semitic slurs but maybe it really is a case of not being able to teach old dogs new tricks. It’s a funny old world we live in. Just 20 years ago designers were revered as gods and what they did or didn’t do in their own personal time didn’t really matter because the consumer had no interaction with the person behind the clothes.

No designer had to be polite, kind or vaguely interesting. We didn’t know their personal views about race, class or gender unless they gave a usually well-curated interview, but now, thanks to social media every thought has the opportunity of being laid bare and sadly, the older generation who really should know better don’t always know how to differentiate between talk they would save for their living rooms (however wrong and inappropriate) and well, everything else.

Only time will tell what the long-term repercussions to the Dolce & Gabbana brand will be but with the Asian market contributing to 30 per cent of D&G’s annual sales this is definitely going to hit them hard. Indeed, if it weren’t for the fact that Gabbana helped found the company, his forced exit would have probably been even more spectacular than Galliano’s. It’s probably his arrogance in his own position that has kept him so unaccountable. In such a situation, you can’t help think of one of Umberto Eco’s phrases about social media where he writes: “Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community. Then they were quickly silenced, but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots.”

Maybe it would do for Mr Gabbana to keep those words in mind next time he feels like sharing his ideas with the world.

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