Why Gucci placing tigers in a glamour setting for Year of the Tiger advertising campaign is all wrong

Gucci adverts timed for Lunar New Year showing tigers at a hotel high tea are wrong on every level. So what if the tiger images were shot in a safe setting?
Rather than advertise the luxury house’s Year of the Tiger collection they promote the exotic-pet trade and petting zoos. Animals don’t belong in ads, Gucci

Kylie Knott

Published: 6:41pm, 20 Jan 2022

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Let’s get straight to the point: Gucci’s latest advertising campaign screams tone deaf.

Designed to promote its Year of the Tiger collection, the campaign depicts “actual tigers” joining a “group of friends for high tea in a retro-style hotel”.

What on earth was Gucci thinking? Oh, obviously it wasn’t.

Not surprisingly, social media users got their claws out, bombarding Gucci’s social accounts with comments such as “the tiger is not a pet”, “free the tigers” and “don’t exploit animals”.

An image from Gucci’s Year of the Tiger advertising campaign. “The tiger is not a pet,” read one critical comment posted to Gucci’s social media. Photo: Gucci

Gucci says the tigers featured in its Year of the Tiger advertising were photographed in a “separate safe environment”. Photo: Gucci

Animal rights groups joined the chorus, calling on Gucci to stop glorifying captive wild animals in their campaigns.

Gucci’s defence? “A third-party animal welfare organisation, American Humane, monitored the set on which animals were present and verified that no animals were harmed”. Furthermore, the “tigers were photographed and filmed in a separate safe environment complying to Gucci’s policies and then featured within the campaign”.

Hotel ‘beast rooms’ looking into concrete tiger enclosure labelled cruel

Wow, a big-cat pat on your back, Gucci, for not harming the animals. But it’s the optics that are harmful. How many people in this “click and flick” culture actually stop to read about how campaign photos are created? Please, they just want to see pretty pictures which, in this case, are pretty damaging.

And spare us your ethical rhetoric. “Nature, wildlife and its denizens are particularly important to Gucci,” says the luxury Italian fashion house in an Instagram post. If Gucci’s creative director, Alessandro Michele, is such a big fan of nature then why put the big cats in such unnatural settings?

The campaign images showing a tiger on a piano, prowling a bar, and women sitting in a posh hotel flanked by big cats while eating tiny cakes only serves to glamorise the exotic-pet trade. And anyone who watched the Netflix series Tiger King knows how big and damaging that trade is – it reported that there are more tigers in captivity in the United States than in the wild in Asia.

Critics of the Gucci Year of the Tiger advertising campaign made their feelings known in comments posted on social media. Photo: courtesy of Instagram

According to WWF, a conservation and environmental NGO, there are about 5,000 captive tigers in the US. Only 3,900 tigers are left in the wild.

Putting people in branded clothes next to tigers also glamorises unsanctioned wildlife parks and petting zoos around the world where people pay big bucks to get a picture with big cats which, say animals rights campaigners, many have been drugged to make them docile and “tame” so humans can play with them.

A tourist poses with a tiger at a petting zoo in Thailand. Photo: Steve Williams/Getty Images

We live in an age where corporate social responsibility is a vital aspect of any company that wants to be seen as decent or ethical. So why do brands continue to feature animals in their misguided marketing?

Gucci, get with the programme and leave animals out of the picture.