Even after a successful show in Italy, Dolce & Gabbana ($PRIVATE:DOLCEGABBANA) has yet to find forgiveness from the online public, especially those who use the Chinese social media plaform Weibo ($WB).
Two weeks ago, the Italian luxury fashion house had its massive "The Great Show" fashion event in Shanghai cancelled due to backlash against controversial advertising, as well as a leaked online conversation that showed co-founder Stefano Gabbana using disparaging language and several feces emojis to describe the country (he's since claimed that he was hacked).
As of November 25, we began tracking Dolce & Gabbana's social media profiles in order to assess how the fashion brand would weather the storm in China. On Weibo, it had 993,933 followers on that day. Two weeks later, the fashion house is down by 15,892 followers.
On Twitter ($TWTR), Dolce & Gabbana's follower count peaked at 5.259 million followers on December 4. In just one week, however, its follower count dropped to 5.258 million followers, which is a slight, but notable, decrease.
While social media follower counts aren't indicitive of how the brand will continue to sell in China, boycotts and protests might. And as a private company, there aren't any stock market changes per say, but the impact of Dolce & Gabbana's fall in the East may help boost other luxury fashion brands trying to beat out D&G.
