I’m starting to regret having started this thread as I think my personal attitude is (understandably) being misunderstood.
I’m not on my high horse about cultural appropriation. How could I be? I’m a New England WASP teaching Javanese gamelan classes in Hawai’i. When I was the only American playing gamelan in various settings in Indonesia, I was welcomed, appreciated, and (far more than I deserved) admired. Long live cultural sharing!
Having said that, I think it is possibly cringeworthy and at the very least humorous when people adopt something from another culture while obviously not understanding the first thing about it. If somebody comes in to my gamelan studio and starts banging the instruments without making any attempt whatsoever to understand what the instruments are or how they are supposed to be played, that’s cringeworthy. If I wear my traditional sarong backward at a Javanese wedding (yeah, that really happened the first time I wore it) that is, for the locals who knew better, pretty funny.
I’m not sure where this dress falls on the cringeworthy to humorous spectrum, but I’m pretty sure it’s on there somewhere.
That is all.
ETA: I would change my mind about the dress if I learned that there is indeed something offensive about it - like, if it appears to be making fun of a funeral ritual or something. I don’t think that’s the case. If I found out that it were, I would indeed jump on the cultural appropriation bandwagon. 95% of the time the concern is misplaced but 5% of the time there is something truly objectionable happening.
Ah! The ad finally came up again and this time I took a screenshot so everyone could see the context. It’s not some lady taking a selfie and selling on Etsy, it is indeed Holapik. Here is the dress so you can see the advertising.
I know nothing about Holapick per se, but I know most places like that tend to get piss-poor reviews. Once or twice I was tempted by Rotita or similar, but a look at the reviews on line convinced me the quality and fit are terrible, you won’t be able to get a refund, and maybe your stuff won’t even arrive. Googling “Holapick review” suggests they are in that category.
This is just like what I dug up on Floryday in my post above. Note that even in your screenshot, the same photo was used two times superimposing two different patterns on the same dress. Also another similar photo, looking like the same model, was used three times superimposing three different dress patterns.
Doing a Google image search, I see that there are dozens of sites using the same photo. I suspect these are all fly-by-night sites, which may really sell you a dress but vanish when you try to return it because it’s crap.
I looks like they just send the dresses to their models at their home, and they (or a friend or somebody) takes the picture in their house. It’s the fashion version of the “Make Money at Home” thing.
Which means it may well have been someone taking a selfie of a home-made dress at their own house, or a dress they bought at a market on holiday, or whatever, and the picture is being used by multiple scam sites without her permission or possibly knowledge (since you can’t see her face).
Like I said, a friend of mine’s photo was used without her permission (or any payment) for an insurance ad - probably a scam insurance company, because there’s no trace of them anywhere except Facebook and their own website. She did not manage to get the photo taken down or the ad stopped because they simply don’t respond to messages. Her image is still out there selling likely non-existent insurance. It might be illegal for them to use her photo, but there’s nothing she can do about it.
The different companies may well be run by the same people, too.
I got taken in by one of these scams on Facebook about three years ago. After investigating, there were numerous different Facebook ads with the exact same wording, exact same photos, and nothing different at all except the company name. There was no actual way of reporting scams to Facebook at the time, so the companies could just keep on doing it over and over with no repercussions. A reporting method was introduced last year, but it doesn’t seem like Facebook follow up on it that much, and it’s easy for a company to just transfer everything to another account.
These companies don’t actually send these clothes out at all, so they don’t need to go to the effort of making a dress and sending it to someone to take a photo - they just use a photo that’s already out there. There are hundreds of thousands of photos of random women wearing dresses that for one reason or another can be found by a Google search.
It’s like the way some of those Nigerian Prince email scams turned out to be run by one company based in the Netherlands, and some Air B&B scams list numerous fake properties, not just one.
Maybe I’m wrong and this woman actually got paid for taking a badly-lit selfie and selling it to lots of different companies, and the dress really was made by one of them, but experience says otherwise.
Interesting, SciFiSam. Another thing is that a lot of the photos, even from different sites, look like they could very well be the same woman (a tall, thin, darkly tanned blonde). Maybe they are!
They do, definitely. Maybe she’s selling her images to those companies, or has taken photos of herself in various dresses and then put them on some stock photo website.
I used to do a thing with friends where we’d do the opposite of dress-down Friday, and put something nice on and post a picture of it. All the photos were on a website we all posted on, not a widely shared site (really not - it was just a group of friends sharing pictures, no random people ever got comment or like the photos or anything like that), but it was also publicly accessible if someone could be arsed to search that hard. A lot of us hid our face because of that - I usually did really silly poses, jumping around and so on. Some of the other photos looked better because they had more pride than me I must have posted at least forty photos in different interesting dresses. Any of the photos that are still there could be accessed and used.
It looks like “Holapick” do sometimes send out some sort of clothing type material, but not necessarily anything to do with the photo they’ve chosen for the ad.
The first comment says:
And I swear that despite this being a recent post, and from someone called Samantha, it’s not me! Maybe they read this thread…
Anyway… Basically I don’t think the issue is why they’d use a white blonde woman to sell that particular dress, because they might not even sell that particular dress. Cultural sensitivity is way down on their list, after scamming customers, avoiding tax, exploiting workers, and using images without permission.
I must have posted at least forty photos in different interesting dresses. Any of the photos that are still there could be accessed and used.