{"id":459565,"date":"2026-05-25T19:45:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T19:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/459565\/"},"modified":"2026-05-25T19:45:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T19:45:09","slug":"breakfast-at-givenchys-met-with-polarized-receptions-in-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/459565\/","title":{"rendered":"Breakfast at Givenchy’s Met With Polarized Receptions in China"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tSHANGHAI<\/a> \u2014 As China<\/a>\u2019s sluggish market drives widespread budget cuts, brands are trying to get more creative with on-the-ground activations. However, a recent Givenchy <\/a>Shanghainese<\/a> breakfast takeover promptly sparked controversy online.<\/p>\n

\n\tOver the weekend, Givenchy<\/a> took over three Shanghainese eateries and one nightclub, where shoppers could purchase the \u201cFour Heavenly Delicacies\u201d of Shanghainese breakfast, including fried dough sticks, sticky rice wraps, soymilk, crispy pancakes, alongside xiaolongbao steamed dumplings, Chinese-style breakfast wraps, and Americano coffees.<\/p>\n

\n\tWith prices ranging from 3 renminbi to 38 renminbi, some Chinese netizens cheered the brand on for being down-to-earth.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cSeeing Givenchy\u2019s black-and-white minimal logo take over the streets of Shanghai<\/a>\u2026I can finally afford Givenchy!\u201d exclaimed one Xiaohongshu user.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe comforting satisfaction of laid-back Chinese brunch, xiaolongbao and soymilk are enough to give me the most genuine, most needed kind of energy,\u201d wrote Hong Kong influencer Nicky Cheung in a social media post.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut as queues stretched beyond the one-hour mark over the humid weekend, online criticism ensued, much of it centered on how Givenchy failed to establish a relevant link between local breakfast culture and the brand itself.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe event, which ran from Friday to Sunday, was promoted via a post titled \u201cBreakfast at Givenchy\u201d on the brand\u2019s official WeChat account.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the post, Givenchy tapped brand ambassador\u00a0Fan Chengcheng\u00a0for an editorial featuring the breakfast items. The brand captioned the images with playful wording such as \u201cFrench elegance meets Chinese lifestyle\u201d and \u201ceat good today, think about tomorrow later.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe brand also invited around 20 local influencers to the pop-up venues carrying Givenchy\u2019s latest Voyou Bucket handbag.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe localized campaign was viewed as paying homage to the iconic little black dress custom-made by Givenchy for\u00a0Audrey Hepburn\u00a0in\u00a0\u201cBreakfast at Tiffany\u2019s<\/a>.\u201d However, without that context, the nuance was clearly lost on the local audience.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThose who can\u2019t afford a Givenchy bag can finally afford to buy a watered-down version of the brand,\u201d wrote a local food critic called Mozhijie on\u00a0Xiaohongshu. \u201cMarketing people are so full of themselves, they\u2019ve mastered the art of \u2018bringing the brand down to earth\u2019 via \u2018lifestyle touchpoints\u2019\u2026 what Givenchy is actually selling is \u2018temporary relief\u2019 for middle-class shoppers by offering a glossed-over version of Shanghai.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHow about y\u2019all start making products people actually want to buy? European and American brands should stop trying to PUA customers,\u201d\u00a0Alex Slavycz, a Shanghai-based creative director, wrote on\u00a0Instagram. PUA, which stands for \u201cpick-up artist,\u201d has morphed into popular social media slang in China<\/a> that broadly refers to acts of mind control. \u201cSlapping your logo on dumplings is not cultural relevance. European and American brands are so lost,\u201d Slavycz added.<\/p>\n

\n\tDespite being criticized on a mass scale, Givenchy is not the first luxury brand to work with local vendors. In 2021,\u00a0Prada<\/a> covered a local wet market <\/a>with its well-known jacquard print, selling fresh produce alongside \u201cPradaness.\u201d In 2023,\u00a0Fendi collaborated with the bubble tea label\u00a0Heytea\u00a0on a 19-renminbi beverage to promote its Beijing exhibition; last year,\u00a0Loewe\u00a0launched a series of customized golden bikes <\/a>with\u00a0Hello Bike\u00a0to promote its latest flagship in Shanghai.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor\u00a0Deya Xu, associate professor of media studies at\u00a0East China<\/a> Normal University\u00a0in Shanghai, Givenchy\u2019s breakfast controversy reflects larger issues facing luxury brands in China today, namely diluted brand equity and consumption segmentation.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cA lack of originality and forward-thinking design has always invited criticism. The backlash against\u00a0\u2018The Devil Wears Prada 2\u2019\u00a0follows the same logic \u2014 people expect fashion houses, especially those at the top tier, to demonstrate a sustained capacity for creativity,\u201d said Xu, who added that her last strong impression of the brand dates back to when\u00a0Chris Lee\u00a0<\/a>was still its brand ambassador more than 10 years ago.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere hasn\u2019t been much progress locally ever since. By pouring its energy and time into this kind of influencer-driven branding exercise, the brand has fallen short of consumer needs,\u201d claimed Xu, who sees the \u201cBreakfast at Tiffany\u2019s\u201d linkage as too vague a connection.<\/p>\n

\n\tXu also sees the controversy as a push and pull between luxury\u2019s exclusivity and the need to generate more sales.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe breakfast pop-up makes visible a tension that has been quietly building inside the brand \u2014 the need to capture new consumers while maintaining the exclusivity that once came naturally from catering exclusively to elites and the super-wealthy. By saying \u2018everyone can have a taste of Givenchy\u2019 \u2014 luring in consumers who might buy one bag every five years \u2014 the brand risks alienating its most important elite clientele. And yet those elite clients are not buying a bag every month anymore either. The economy has seen to that,\u201d Xu added.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere is also a level of service that consumers in Shanghai expect, but from accounts on the ground, the event seemed designed to generate user-created social media images rather than focus on the food itself,\u201d Xu added.<\/p>\n

\n\tWWD has reached out to Givenchy for comment.<\/p>\n

\n\tGiven the lackluster retail climate in China, Givenchy has been retreating from brick-and-mortar retail. Closures include locations at some of China\u2019s key retail addresses \u2014 Plaza 66 and Reel Department Store in Shanghai, Changsha IFS, and Tianjin MixC, among others. The contraction also extends to its Asian diffusion line, G Givenchy, which previously maintained a notable presence in second- and third-tier cities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SHANGHAI \u2014 As China\u2019s sluggish market drives widespread budget cuts, brands are trying to get more creative with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":459566,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1657,146,78819,85,46,5733],"class_list":["post-459565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-china","tag-entertainment","tag-givenchy","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-shanghai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=459565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459565\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/459566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=459565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=459565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=459565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}