British GQ has officially joined the ranks of the NBA and Blizzard Entertainment in publicly acting out of fear of “offending” the human rights-violating Chinese government.
One of the most significant stories of 2019 has been influential western entities caving to China amid the ongoing pro-Democracy protests in Hong Kong against the authoritarian communist regime. The NBA, following the leads of commissioner Adam Silver and Los Angeles Lakers superstar LeBron James, infamously cowered to China after one team executive dared to express support for the pro-Democracy protesters on social media. The backlash was swift and severe, as it was for gaming company Blizzard after it punished a popular professional player for likewise showing support for the pro-freedom demonstrators.
Now, as reported by BuzzFeed News, British GQ has gotten in on the caving to China action, quietly pulling two international leaders from their “World’s Top 10 Worst Dressers” list — leaving the list conspicuously two names short — out of what a spokesperson later admitted was fear of causing “unintended offense.”
“During the course of this week, other news websites, like the Mail Online, picked up on the list, spreading the word about whom British GQ thought were the world’s 10 worst dressers,” BuzzFeed reports. “But on GQ’s own website, something was different. The ‘top 10’ list had become a ‘top 8’. Missing were two individuals: China’s president Xi Jinping and king of Thailand Maha Vajiralongkorn.”
“It is not Hong Kong’s courageous freedom fighters that Xi Jinping should have a problem with. It’s his tailor,” the entry for the Chinese president pulled from the digital version of the article read. “Xi gets totalitarian style cues from his hero, the mass murderer Chairman Mao, who enforced a dour and plain dress code for the Communist Party.”
The likewise deleted critique of Vajiralongkorn read: “How many others living deities do you know with a penchant for really tight crop tops, hipster jeans and fake tattoos? The answer is none. And that’s because no other exist.”
While it pulled the entries for those two international figures, British GQ chose to leave on its list U.S. President Donald Trump, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings, among others.
So what motivated the glaring removal of the two world leaders? A spokesperson at Condé Nast, the mass media company that owns GQ, told BuzzFeed that management ordered the two leaders pulled from the unflattering list out of fear of causing “unintended offense.”
Sources at GQ’s parent company told BuzzFeed that if the piece had been a “hard-hitting piece of journalism,” management would have stood by the inclusion of critical references to the two leaders. But since the worst dressed list was intended to be a “light-hearted list meant for a UK audience,” management ordered the two figures to be digitally disappeared, maintaining that the potential fallout simply wasn’t worth it.
With local editions of some of its magazines in both China and Thailand, Condé Nast decided that it was wiser to just delete the entries than to open up the possibility that the unenviable list would stir up unnecessary problems globally.
“We are conscious that digitally published stories travel globally and can gain traction where they lack the necessary context and can cause unintended offense,” a spokesperson for the media company told BuzzFeed, noting that the full story still remains in the printed edition of the magazine.
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