A wave of criticism from Chinese online users has pushed French fashion label Lemaire to issue a public apology, after a recent fragrance campaign was widely condemned as culturally insensitive.
The controversy was sparked by a handful of editorial images promoting 'Objets Senteur,' a collection of five home fragrance objects designed to scent wardrobes and domestic spaces. One shows a model sensually playing with a Qing dynasty-style long braid. Another is a still-life of the braided diffuser, called Tresse, French for braid, placed beside a pair of scissors. A third shows the object hanging over a button-down shirt.
Chinese netizens on Xiaohongshu and WeChat were quick to question the appropriateness of the brand's use of these symbols. One user described it as its "spooky editorial direction." Historically, the queue, a long braid worn down the back with the front of the head shaved, was not a hairstyle Han Chinese men chose during the Qing dynasty, which ruled from 1644 to 1911. It was imposed by foreign rulers, enforced on pain of death, and it remains one of the most enduring symbols of subjugation in Chinese memory. Cutting it, when the dynasty fell, meant liberation. Scissors, in that context, are not a neutral aesthetic prop in China.
In response, Lemaire pulled the campaign and acknowledged it had "not sufficiently considered differences in perception and sensitivity across cultural contexts," committed to review internal processes.
Online criticism is yet to die down. A widely circulated post on Xiaohongshu called the campaign a "failed act of visual communication", evoking "violence and humiliation." A Xiaohongshu post by @crossingnote Dahong, with 70k+ followers, said: “As a longtime Lemaire fan, when I saw the braid accessory and how it was displayed, especially the one next to a scissor, I was utterly disappointed. Always trust your instinct when you come across cultural content that makes you feel uncomfortable." Many netizens accused the brand of 硬凹 (yìng āo), Mandarin for the forceful contorting of cultural elements into an aesthetic that doesn't earn them. Boycott calls have also followed.
Lemaire is not the first Western brand to misread China. Dolce & Gabbana’s 2018 chopsticks debacle ended with leaked racist messages by its founders and years brought frozen off the market. Dior, Gucci and Swatch have all faced accusations of racial insensitivity. Balenciaga triggered outrage after the mistreatment of a Chinese shopper in Paris. By now, the pattern of cultural misstep, online fury, and apology cycle is well-worn and established. What changes is the brand. What rarely does is the room that approved the work in the first place.
For brands operating in China, cultural fluency is not a nice-to-have or part of the strategy deck. It belongs in the commercial infrastructure, core to the P&L.
Campaign Asia-Pacific asked the industry whether this is a case of cultural appropriation, cultural illiteracy or simply the internet escalating outrage? More to the point, why do luxury brands with global PR machines, diversity consultants and local market teams stumble into the same blind spots and what would it take to fix the system, not just the apology?
Angela Sy
CEO, The 25S
China
The difference is whether it is made for China and made with China. And that’s the issue here.
Lemaire isn't a Chinese brand, and almost certainly doesn't have Chinese people in the room where the work gets made. I've been in China for 17 years and I need to defer to my colleagues on deep cultural reads, not out of sensitivity, but out of accuracy just because there’s so many things I don’t understand. There's a layer of inherited memory you can't study your way into. Brands need to stop treating China as a revenue market and start treating it as a co-author.
These fashion houses keep tripping because their China strategy is still being authored from Paris, Milan, or New York, with a China office translating outputs. The bigger pattern inside MNCs is the tug-of-war between local teams and global HQ. It ebbs and flows: a few years of localising, then global consistency reasserts itself, then someone decries the work isn't local enough, and the cycle restarts. Nobody ever lands on a stable answer because the question itself is wrong.
The fix isn't more localisation. Brands should enter China on their own terms, fully themselves, and trust Chinese consumers to meet them. China appreciates craftsmanship. Excellence and cultural fluency are different muscles. The houses that get this right like Hermès, Bottega, The Row don't perform Chineseness. They show up at full conviction and let the consumer decide. This native authenticity cannot be acquired via a campaign or a collab; it’s built through presence and humility to be edited by people who know things you don’t.
Carol Chan
Founder and managing director, Comms8
I think there are two dynamics at play here.
The political environment today has made everything more sensitive. Fashion does not exist in a vacuum anymore. A creative decision that may have been intended as styling can quickly be interpreted through the lens of national identity, historical grievance and geopolitical tension.
In Lemaire’s case, the braided linen object itself may have been part of a global creative direction rather than a deliberate reference to Chinese history. But the way it was presented, especially alongside elements such as scissors, was always going to carry risk in China, where the queue hairstyle has a very specific historical association. That is where the mistake becomes less about intent and more about cultural interpretation.
At the same time, brands cannot simply dismiss backlash as oversensitivity. If China, or any culturally complex market, is commercially important to them, local cultural expertise needs to be involved much earlier in the creative process.
The deeper issue is structural. Many global brands still start with a central creative idea and only localise it afterwards. By that point, the local team is often too far downstream, responsible for adaptation but with little real authority over the overall direction. That is where mistakes happen.
The fix is not to make fashion creatively timid. Fashion and art need room to provoke, experiment and challenge. But creative freedom and cultural intelligence should not be treated as opposites.
If a brand is serious about China, or any market with deep cultural and historical complexity, local voices need to be in the room earlier, with enough authority to challenge, shape and sense-check the work before it becomes a public controversy.
Jacopo Pesavento
CEO, Branding Records
Hong Kong
Luxury doesn’t have a learning problem in China; it has a memory problem. Each case gets treated like a one-off PR issue, when it’s actually structural. Global teams still make decisions with local blind spots, and cultural insight comes in too late to change anything meaningful.
Cultural intelligence needs to sit upstream, with real authority. Otherwise, this pattern won’t change. That said, not every controversy is accidental. Some brands, Balenciaga being the clearest example, operate right at the edge on purpose. Provocation is part of the strategy. If you’re targeting a younger, more rebellious luxury audience, tension can drive relevance. But it’s a high-risk trade. In China, especially, backlash tends to outlast the attention spike. What starts as calculated provocation can quickly turn into long-term brand damage.
This is where the right partner matters. Agencies acting as true brand guardians can either intercept these risks early, or help a brand lean into them deliberately, if that’s the strategy. The role is not just to localise, but to challenge and calibrate decisions before they go live.
Ultimately, brands need to be clear on what they’re optimising for: broad acceptance, or cultural relevance within a narrow but influential audience. You can’t consistently do both. And you don’t need to. Luxury doesn’t require mass approval; it requires the right people to care.
Until brands are honest about that choice, we’ll keep seeing the same cycle.
Elisa Harca
Co-founder Red Ant Asia
The internet loves to go crazy and cancel culture is a real thing. Sometimes, things will back fire, even with the best intent, the best rigour—this happens all over the world. Cancel culture is the name of the game in our day and age and that’s a problem.
I really see luxury brands and brands in general making more and more efforts to get closer to the culture and co create in China—I feel we have evolved and there is a greater understanding of how brands should /can show up …..I think this time, sadly Lemaire just got unlucky.
The best way to conduct creative is working with cross cultural teams to do your best to land it right but creative, especially intellectual creative ….and high fashion especially can be too high brow/abstract for the average internet user ….you can’t always worry about making everyone love what you do, as you need to have a point of view …this is the definition of art and creative. Of course you don’t want to offend but something like the Lemaire campaign is nuanced and not a slam-dunk bad idea.
Kaitlin Zhang
CEO, Oval Branding
The
fix isn't complicated. Chinese cultural advisors with deep brand knowledge must have a seat at the table during the
creative process, not on speed-dial post-crisis. Brands that are genuinely building in China need to stop treating
cultural knowledge as a risk management function and start treating it as a creative function.
Respect is mutual. Brands that want to gain the respect of Chinese consumers need to start from a position of humility, divert adequate resources and build processes to honour the cultures in which they wish to operate.
Faye Xiao
Engagement manager, Prophet
What feels “safe” through a Western lens, where sensitivity is often framed around race, religion, and identity, can vary in China, where the fault lines run through history, national identity, and collective memory.
The issue runs deeper than misreading context. In fashion, symbols are often treated as aesthetic material. When a symbol carries collective memory or even trauma, it is no longer just visual. It becomes contextual, and often political, whether intended or not. The question is not just whether something is offensive, but whether certain symbols should be freely recontextualized at all.
The fix is not better apologies or stricter approvals. Give local teams real authorship to balance between preserving the brand’s creative vision and ideas shaped through local context.
Jacob Cooke
CEO, WPIC Marketing + Technologies
China
Give China-based teams real authority from the beginning of the process if you want to succeed.
One of the catchphrases circling in China’s foreign business community is “in China, for China”. You simply cannot sell into China without local teams and insights, baked into the business model.
With the latest Lemaire scandal, it’s clear that many luxury brands are not empowering local teams in their concept or execution stage. Creative direction is often set in Paris or Milan, with China brought in late to localise, soften edges or manage fallout. By that stage, the campaign is already moving, budgets are committed and the commercial pressure to ship tends to outweigh internal objections.
Local PR teams and cultural consultants can catch the most obvious missteps. What they cannot do is correct a process in which China is consulted too late to meaningfully change the work.
Umang Pabaru
Former global VP, CRM & Loyalty, Estée Lauder
APAC
Hong Kong
China and the US are now the sector’s two largest markets, yet Western houses still treat Asia as a cash cow rather than a cultural partner. Regional teams are routinely brought in, often too late, to validate a finished concept rather than to architect it. When HQ retains absolute creative control, local teams are left to execute or apologise.
The beauty industry offers a clear roadmap. It shifted from adapting global campaigns to building locally relevant narratives from the ground up, embedding regional expertise at the earliest stages. The fix requires a fundamental shift in workflow. The window is closing. If legacy brands treat cultural relevance as a PR safeguard rather than an operating principle, rising domestic luxury houses will step in and claim the market.
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Source: Campaign Asia-Pacific
