Dolce & Gabbana files $600 million lawsuit against 2 fashion bloggers

Lawsuits never go out of style.

Dolce & Gabbana has filed suit against two U.S. fashion bloggers, demanding more than $600 million in damages.

The suit argues that posts from Diet Prada, which exposed racist messages from founder Stefano Gabbana’s Instagram account in 2018, cost the luxury Italian fashion house millions in revenue.

Dolce & Gabbana filed the lawsuit in Milan in 2019, but it was not publicly known until Thursday when Diet Prada, a popular fashion blog run by Tony Liu and Lindsey Schuyler, posted about it.

The fashion house was heavily criticized in November 2018 when it released an advertisement that mocked Chinese culture ahead of a fashion show in Shanghai. Dolce & Gabbana canceled the show and removed the ad after people on both sides of the Pacific slammed it as racist.

Just before the Shanghai show was called off, Diet Prada reposted racist Instagram messages from Stefano Gabbana’s account, one of which simply read: “China Ignorant Dirty Smelling Mafia.”

The messages were originally sent to an Asian woman, Michaela Tranova, who shared them.

“The country of [five poop emojis] is China,” one message read, while another said Gabbana defended the questionable ad, and others at the company had it removed.

Dolce & Gabbana publicly apologized for the ad, but claimed Stefano Gabbana’s Instagram account had been hacked and said he was not the one who sent the racist messages to Tranova.

In the lawsuit, the company argues it lost 450 million euros worth of brand image and nearly 90 million euros worth of sales in Asia, the Associated Press reported. It also seeks smaller damages for the cancellation of the Shanghai show.

“This whole case is a way of trying to silence Diet Prada, and to silence Tony and Lindsey personally,” a lawyer for Diet Prada, Susan Scafidi, told the AP. Scafidi works at the Fashion Law Institute at Fordham Law School, which is coordinating Liu and Schuyler’s defense alongside Italian law firm AMSL Avvocati.

The Italian lawyers filed a brief earlier this week arguing the case should not be heard in Italy, because the defendants live in the U.S. and the alleged damages were based in Asia, the AP reported. Diet Prada said its team filed a freedom of speech defense Monday.

“Having cultivated Diet Prada as a platform where we can denounce racism, amplify stories from the larger BIPOC community, and hold the fashion industry to a higher ethical standard, has been one of the most rewarding experiences thus far and our only hope is to protect that,” Liu and Schuyler wrote in a post.