SHANGHAI — As China’s sluggish market drives widespread budget cuts, brands are trying to get more creative with on-the-ground activations. However, a recent Givenchy Shanghainese breakfast takeover promptly sparked controversy online.

Over the weekend, Givenchy took over three Shanghainese eateries and one nightclub, where shoppers could purchase the “Four Heavenly Delicacies” of Shanghainese breakfast, including fried dough sticks, sticky rice wraps, soymilk, crispy pancakes, alongside xiaolongbao steamed dumplings, Chinese-style breakfast wraps, and Americano coffees.

With prices ranging from 3 renminbi to 38 renminbi, some Chinese netizens cheered the brand on for being down-to-earth.

“Seeing Givenchy’s black-and-white minimal logo take over the streets of Shanghai…I can finally afford Givenchy!” exclaimed one Xiaohongshu user.

“The comforting satisfaction of laid-back Chinese brunch, xiaolongbao and soymilk are enough to give me the most genuine, most needed kind of energy,” wrote Hong Kong influencer Nicky Cheung in a social media post.

But 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.

The event, which ran from Friday to Sunday, was promoted via a post titled “Breakfast at Givenchy” on the brand’s official WeChat account.

In the post, Givenchy tapped brand ambassador Fan Chengcheng for an editorial featuring the breakfast items. The brand captioned the images with playful wording such as “French elegance meets Chinese lifestyle” and “eat good today, think about tomorrow later.”

The brand also invited around 20 local influencers to the pop-up venues carrying Givenchy’s latest Voyou Bucket handbag.

The localized campaign was viewed as paying homage to the iconic little black dress custom-made by Givenchy for Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” However, without that context, the nuance was clearly lost on the local audience.

“Those who can’t afford a Givenchy bag can finally afford to buy a watered-down version of the brand,” wrote a local food critic called Mozhijie on Xiaohongshu. “Marketing people are so full of themselves, they’ve mastered the art of ‘bringing the brand down to earth’ via ‘lifestyle touchpoints’… what Givenchy is actually selling is ‘temporary relief’ for middle-class shoppers by offering a glossed-over version of Shanghai.”

“How about y’all start making products people actually want to buy? European and American brands should stop trying to PUA customers,” Alex Slavycz, a Shanghai-based creative director, wrote on Instagram. PUA, which stands for “pick-up artist,” has morphed into popular social media slang in China that broadly refers to acts of mind control. “Slapping your logo on dumplings is not cultural relevance. European and American brands are so lost,” Slavycz added.

Despite being criticized on a mass scale, Givenchy is not the first luxury brand to work with local vendors. In 2021, Prada covered a local wet market with its well-known jacquard print, selling fresh produce alongside “Pradaness.” In 2023, Fendi collaborated with the bubble tea label Heytea on a 19-renminbi beverage to promote its Beijing exhibition; last year, Loewe launched a series of customized golden bikes with Hello Bike to promote its latest flagship in Shanghai.

For Deya Xu, associate professor of media studies at East China Normal University in Shanghai, Givenchy’s breakfast controversy reflects larger issues facing luxury brands in China today, namely diluted brand equity and consumption segmentation.

“A lack of originality and forward-thinking design has always invited criticism. The backlash against ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ follows the same logic — people expect fashion houses, especially those at the top tier, to demonstrate a sustained capacity for creativity,” said Xu, who added that her last strong impression of the brand dates back to when Chris Lee was still its brand ambassador more than 10 years ago.

“There hasn’t 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,” claimed Xu, who sees the “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” linkage as too vague a connection.

Xu also sees the controversy as a push and pull between luxury’s exclusivity and the need to generate more sales.

“The breakfast pop-up makes visible a tension that has been quietly building inside the brand — 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 ‘everyone can have a taste of Givenchy’ — luring in consumers who might buy one bag every five years — 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,” Xu added.

“There 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,” Xu added.

WWD has reached out to Givenchy for comment.

Given the lackluster retail climate in China, Givenchy has been retreating from brick-and-mortar retail. Closures include locations at some of China’s key retail addresses — 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.