Gwen Stefani is in the hot seat right now thanks to a declaration she made in a new interview.
In a feature for Allure, the 53-year-old Love. Angel. Music. Baby. entertainer opened up about her latest GXVE Beauty collection. In the interview, she also talked about her connection to Japanese culture, and addressed past controversies that she found herself in regarding cultural appropriation for her styling and the four Japanese and Japanese American backup dancers she called the “Harajuku Girls” who used to be with her when she promoted her music and fashion many years ago.
Gwen spoke of her Italian-American dad coming home with stories of street performers when he was working at Yamaha, which led to him traveling for 18 years between their home in California and Japan:
“That was my Japanese influence and that was a culture that was so rich with tradition, yet so futuristic [with] so much attention to art and detail and discipline and it was fascinating to me.”
She went on to declare:
“I said, ‘My God, I’m Japanese and I didn’t know it’… I am, you know.”
And she added that there is an “innocence” to her relationship with Japanese culture and referred to herself as a “super fan”, saying:
“If [people are] going to criticize me for being a fan of something beautiful and sharing that, then I just think that doesn’t feel right. I think it was a beautiful time of creativity… a time of the ping-pong match between Harajuku culture and American culture. [It] should be okay to be inspired by other cultures because if we’re not allowed then that’s dividing people, right?”
The writer of the piece, senior editor Jess Marie Calaor, described how her interview with Gwen went:
“I spent 32 minutes in conversation with Stefani, many of them devoted to her lengthy answer to my question about Harajuku Lovers. In that time, she said more than once that she is Japanese. Allure’s social media associate (who is Asian and Latina) was also present for the interview and we were left questioning what we had heard. Maybe she misspoke? Again and again?
During our interview, Stefani asserted twice that she was Japanese and once that she was ‘a little bit of an Orange County girl, a little bit of a Japanese girl, a little bit of an English girl.’ Surely, she didn’t mean it literally or she didn’t know what she was saying? (A representative for Stefani reached out the next day, indicating that I had misunderstood what Stefani was trying to convey. Allure later asked Stefani’s team for an on-the-record comment or clarification of these remarks and they declined to provide a statement or participate in a follow-up interview.)”
The story has gone viral on social media, and Gwen has been receiving a lot of backlash for her comments.
