The latest advertisement for Dior’s new perfume is dumb. For their perfume, “Sauvage,” or the French term for wild or savage, the French fashion house introduced and then spiked a campaign clearly celebrating Native American culture in collaboration with indigenous advocacy organization Americans for Indian Opportunity. Even though Dior did their ample due diligence in integrating Native American talent not just on screen but in the pre-production of the campaign, the brand is still facing cries of cultural appropriation.
But the Sauvage ads shouldn’t be canceled by our woke betters for celebrating Native American culture. The ads should be pulled for celebrating an alleged wife-beater, against whom plenty of incriminating evidence has emerged.
Despite facing multiple physical assault allegations for decades, Johnny Depp earned the widespread defense of Hollywood and its sycophantic excuse of a media after his ex-wife Amber Heard obtained a temporary restraining order against him after an alleged violent attack from the actor. Heard, who maintained that Depp engaged in multiple instances of assault, usually in conjunction with his well-documented substance abuse habit, filed for divorce. Depp, who has since denied the abuse and later slapped her with a defamation suit, reached a $7 million divorce settlement, the entirety of which Heard donated to charity.
Heard provided photographs of injuries, videos of Depp’s threatening behavior, including one of him throwing a wine bottle and glass after the actress attempted to get him to calm down, and a contemporaneously corroborating witness. (Depp’s defenders include staffers at their penthouse building, the Art Deco Eastern Columbia building in downtown Los Angeles where the actor kept multiple properties for more than a year after Heard filed for divorce.)
Yet even in the #MeToo era, Depp has somehow managed to evade any consequences. The allegations against Depp are not evidence-free charges from some 30 years back. They fit the evidence and the personal patterns demonstrated by him for his entire tenure in public life.
There’s no doubt that baseless charges have attempted to ruin men for nothing more than poor judgment, but Heard’s story alleges criminal behavior. Given the extent that the fashion industry lauds its own wokeness, couldn’t Dior at least have held the breaks on lionizing Depp until his supposed exculpatory evidence in his defamation suit emerged? It’s not as though any other fading A-lister wouldn’t have sufficed in the spot.
It ultimately didn’t matter though. Dior pulled the ad spot, for its use of Native American imagery rather than for its use of a credibly accused abuser.
