‘It wasn’t intentional’: Naomi Campbell defends Gucci following the ‘blackface’ sweater scandal
- The sweater scandal turned out to be a catalyst for Gucci to invest in long-ignored communities and opened conversation about corporate responsibility
It all turned on a tweet, as so many controversies do these days. Twitter blew a hole in Gucci’s image. When faced with the damage, the company decided it required more than just a patch.
In mid-January, Gucci head Marco Bizzarri was leading a company meeting in Milan on diversity. The focus was the Changemakers program, which had launched in 2018 to support social justice issues. Bizzarri was delighted with the way things were going: “I was thinking, ‘I’m the CEO of the best diversity[-driven] company there was.’”
Then about two weeks later, social media exploded in outrage over a Gucci sweater that critics described as evoking blackface. It was black with a high turtleneck collar that covered the lower half of the face with a cut-out for the mouth that was rimmed in bright red. Some people called for a boycott of the brand. Others threatened to burn any Gucci merchandise in their own closets.
Gucci executives were shell-shocked – the sweater had been on store shelves for months without generating a single negative comment. But Bizzarri also knew that “in the digital era, if someone says this is blackface, it’s blackface.”
“It was hard to see such a small thing put in danger everything we believe,” he says.
But Gucci’s sweater scandal was not such a small thing. It turned out to be a catalyst for company investments in long-ignored communities. It opened the door to an expanded conversation about corporate responsibility in the luxury realm. And it raised the question: As our world becomes ever more interdependent, what do we really know about each other?
On Friday afternoon, Gucci’s key decision-makers were in town for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute gala. The company is the lead sponsor for the accompanying exhibition, Camp: Notes on Fashion. But days before team Gucci walked fashion’s most extravagant red carpet, Bizzarri and other top execs were at the Nomad hotel, tucked into a stylish, mid-century meets Harry Potter cupola, where they talked about what the company has learned from the experience.
