Don’t blame Chinese model Zuo Ye for working with Dolce & Gabbana – escaping tokenism is a constant battle

Whether Zuo Ye knew she would be typecast is beside the point. Why is it that people of colour are still tasked with making choices like these just to sustain their livelihoods?

Smart, considered representations of oppressed social groups are still relatively rare in the media. It’s the reason people like me still exclaim with excitement when, once in a blue moon, a black family (for bonus points, a black family with a dark-skinned black woman at the helm) appears in an advert. It’s why the slow shift away from depicting disabled people as what the disability campaigner Sarah Troke calls “object[s] of charity” is so welcome. It’s why the long overdue presence of a Muslim family on Coronation Street and, more recently, a lesbian Muslim character really matters.

It barely happens, but when it does, it’s almost akin to having your mirror image reflected back at you when you’ve been used to caricatures standing in your place your entire life.

So what happens when, as a marginalised person yourself, you find yourself playing one of those caricatures? For model Zuo Ye, who recently featured in Dolce and Gabbana’s deplored advert, the experience of being duped into the starring tokestic role was enough to “almost ruin [her] modelling career”.

You’ve probably seen it by now: the 40-second long orientalist depiction of Chinese culture, complete with a painfully patronising voiceover guiding the model through the eating of oversized Italian meals with cheap chopsticks. The wider campaign, chiefly in China, to boycott the designer brand for relying on age-old racist representations of Chinese people gained just as much, if not more, notoriety than the advert itself. As the #boycottdolce hashtag gained traction, retailers pulled their products. TFBoys band member Wang Junkai stepped down from his role as Chinese brand ambassador for D&G and a number of other famous figures denounced the long-criticised creative decisions of the designer brand.

And Zuo herself also became a target for that anger.

Describing the shoot as “different from what [she] initially expected”, Zuo claimed in an apology on Chinese social media platform Weibo that she felt “uncomfortable” once it became clear what her role in the advert would be.

She said: “During the filming process, I was required by the director to laugh from ear to ear [and] laugh behind [my] hands.

“As the food given was all super-sized, I did feel embarrassed when holding chopsticks. At the same time, I was required to laugh in an exaggerated way, but I hate to laugh in real life.”

Following that Zuo claimed to have “received lots of attacks and threats online” as well as being harassed “through phone calls, email and online”, noting that part of the reason she initially signed on for the role was due to the opportunities working “with any top brand” overseas as a Chinese model would bring her.

As with many people of colour who find themselves caught up in roles that do their community more harm than good, there has been some scepticism over whether Zuo’s prior knowledge of the job was as limited as she claims. But whether or not she knew is beside the point; the advert should not have been made. The more important question is this: why it is that people of colour are still tasked with making choices like these, just to sustain their livelihoods?

In terms of its commercial success, D&G is not an insignificant brand. It has power beyond the means of a single model, and it has, in my opinion, unapologetically leaned into racist stereotypes for years – the 2012 Blackamoor earrings on the runway incident springs to mind. So to present this affair as anything other than an example of what happens when power imbalances push people into uncomfortable positions would be disingenuous.

Ascribing Zuo a level of influence to the point of being able to convince a global fashion powerhouse to change its entire orientalist treatment is naive. Control for productions like these lies firmly in the hands of creative teams – most likely dominated by white employees – who have been free to dream up these nods to racism unchallenged for years, either because there’s no one there to object or because the few people who would do not feel supported enough to challenge the status quo.

It’s the same lack of scrutiny that led Dove to consider it wise to place a black woman as the “before” and a white woman as the “after” in social media ads for its moisturiser. Having hoped to seize an “opportunity to represent [her] dark-skinned sisters in a global beauty brand”, Lola Ogunyemi, the black model in question, was moved to speak out about her experience, noting that although the full version did not necessarily play into colourism, it still raised questions over the importance of examining “whether your content shows that your consumer’s voice is not only heard, but also valued”.

That’s exactly what the problem here is. Advertising is reported as becoming increasingly diverse, but it still so easily falls short of moving beyond stereotypes.

Thankfully, consumers are slowly beginning to grasp the consequences of tokenism. It’s not just harmless fun, nor is it just a matter of hurting people’s feelings. As with Zuo, the fallout can ruin a career – as well as crushing the dreams and ambitions of millions of people from minority groups desperate to see new and interesting representations of themselves in culture.