Italian fashion brand Gucci is garnering a lot of feedback for their latest show at Milan Fashion Week and it's not all positive.
Their autumn/winter runway show at the event, held on February 21, featured a few bizarre concepts, including models holding dragons and sculptures of their own heads, but that's not all that caught people's attention online.
The show featured hijabs, niqabs, and Sikh turbans, sparking a backlash among social media users who accused the brand of cultural appropriation and offending religious sentiments.
Branded by Gucci’s creative director Alessandro Michele, the event "drew inspiration from Donna Haraway’s 1984 essay on ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, which rejects the idea of rigid boundaries separating humans from animals and machines," HuffPost UK reported.
However, the concept seemed to have hit a sour note with many, including Muslim tweeps who were having none of it...
"It’s as though they’re doing it on purpose for attention"
Although most of the backlash targeted the brand's featuring of Sikh turbans in their show, Muslim tweeps were also quite upset over the way hijabs and niqabs were portrayed.
Many others were angered by the fact that the brand dressed white models in symbolic cultural and religious attire.
Speaking to HuffPost UK, Lamisa Khan, a reporter at Amaliah, a website representing Muslim women, explained why people found the show problematic.
"The turban look was an absolute mockery and the bindi. It doesn’t feel like it’s done by accident anymore. It's as though they're doing it on purpose for attention," she said.
"Imagine growing up being mocked for wearing henna, a hijab, turban or bindi and then seeing it on a catwalk considered to be fashionable and its actual meaning and cultural importance neglected and sidelined for the purpose of aesthetic for that season," she added.
Khan's criticism isn't isolated as hundreds of people took to social media posting similar views.