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Gwen Stefani raised eyebrows this week and draw fierce backlash for claiming during a magazine interview that he was Japanese.
The pop singer made the comments during a chat with Allure magazine while promoting beauty brand Gxve. But the conversation turned to her past beauty venture, a 2008 fragrance line called Harajuku Lovers.
The perfume brand is named after the Harajuku district in Tokyo, Japan. During the interview, Stefani denied that she considered Japanese culture, but that she was instead inspired by her father’s frequent trips to the country as a child, which she later visited as an adult.
“I said, ‘Oh my God, I’m Japanese and I don’t understand,'” Stefani said of visiting Harajuku for the first time. “Me, you know.”
Later in the interview, she claimed that she was an “Orange County girl, a Japanese girl, an English girl.”
It’s a shame that Gwen Stefani chose to tone down her orientalism in 2023. I remember how uncomfortable I felt during the “Harajuku Girl” era almost 20 years ago, but it wasn’t easy to express those feelings before social media. . https://t.co/oCmU38Bu55
Allure reported that Stefani’s team reached out the next day to say the reporter had misunderstood what the singer said, but declined to provide an additional statement or grant a follow-up interview.
CBC News has reached out to Stefani’s representatives for comment.
It’s cultural appropriation, critics say
The comments fueled longstanding criticism that Stefani, who was born and raised in California and is not ethnically Japanese, was adopting a culture that was not hers.
Stefani often played up her affinity for the Harajuku aesthetic during her 2000s stardom. After releasing her album Love. Angel. Music. Baby in 2004, he hired four Japanese and Japanese-American backup dancers (named Love, Angel, Music and Baby) to appear in music videos and accompany him to public events.
Harajuku Lovers, the fragrance line, is a collection of five perfume bottles designed to look like caricatures of Stefani and her backup dancers. Stefani then launched the Harajuku Mini children’s clothing line for Target in 2011.
“If [people are] going to criticize me for being a fan of beautiful things and showing them off, so I just think that’s not true,” she said in an Allure interview. A pong match between Harajuku culture and American culture.”
“[It] It should be okay to be inspired by other cultures, because if it’s not allowed, then it’s dividing people, right?”
The singer was also criticized this summer for wearing dreadlocks and the colors of the Jamaican flag in a music video for a Sean Paul song. My Fire Light.
Stefani, who is also the lead singer of a pop-rock band No doubt about ithas been accused of cultural appropriation in the past for using reggae and ska influences in his music.
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