This past week Gucci released a Black face turtleneck with a lip hole and cheap trick colored lipstick surrounding the hole.
My first thought was who the hell wears a turtleneck with a hole in it, which quickly gave way to, what the fuck were thinking with the red lipstick?
Then it hit me, these asshats went to the racist free publicity playbook, in an effort to get people talking about the brand. It’s worked perfectly for the other brands that have done it over the last year or so. Remember the Prada monkey purse trinket, or the H&M monkey tee.
They took a quick hit of negative publicity surrounding racial charged fashion faux paux but got millions of dollars worth of free publicity for their brands during their respected news cycles.
All they did was issue a half as apology, pulled the “we didn’t realize that it was culturally insensitive” item off the shelf’s and continued with business as usual.
Have we stopped wearing any of those brands, no!
Are we going to stop wearing Gucci, I doubt it!
So what should we or can we do?
I suggest doing what Trevor Noah jokes about on The Daily Show. Make these “oops our bad corporations” pay Black people every time they do something like this, or we should boycott them until they do.
Not in the form of you get a stack, or you get a stack, but we should demand that they donate to a grassroots charitable organization ran by Black people, if they want our business going forward.
We need to go in knowing what we want in order to get what we want and give them a time table, so we won’t get caught up in an endless boycott that we’ll end up breaking a few months from now anyway.