SM Entertainment’s obsession with the word “global” may be hurting its artists
Artists under SM Entertainment are being mocked for the company’s obsession with global titles.
Being under SM Entertainment is the dream of many aspiring idols, seeing that the company has created many legendary artists in the Kpop industry. However, such a big company has severely disappointed fans for numerous times due to mismanagement, particularly when they proclaim “global titles” and get their artists mocked.
Recently, Harper’s Bazaar Korea published news that Yoona has attended Miu Miu’s fashion show for the first time after becoming the brand’s “Global Ambassador”. However, the magazine edited their captions later to remove the word “Global”, leaving Yoona as the Ambassador instead.
Then, SM continued Harper’s Bazaar’s mistake by calling Yoona a “global queen”, and immediately drew a lot of criticisms to the SNSD members. At the time, many netizens mocked SM, having speculated that SM was trying to add “global” to Yoona’s title.
SM invested a lot of time and funds into aespa, and so the girl group drew attention right from their debut. However, when aespa traveled to Paris as ambassadors for Givenchy, they faced all sorts of issues, from VISA problems, ill-fitted outfits, to arriving late at the Givenchy show.
Amidst mixed reactions, SM posted a photo of aespa and Givenchy on Twitter with a caption that call the four girls a “global fashion icon”. As a result, many people mocked SM for “exaggerating” considering aespa is not conveying the image of Givenchy good enough.
In fact, despite SM being the one to brag, the ire of netizens was directed at aespa. The group received all sorts of harsh words, with people bringing up their “plagiarism controversy” and calling them lackluster and not worthy of being Givenchy’s ambassadors, for they were unable to highlight the brand’s clothing. Even true fashion icons like BLACKPINK and G-Dragon hasn’t bestowed themselves as “global fashion icon”, netizens said, before condemning aespa.
On the other hand, SM artists also run into trouble with ambassador titles a few times. A notable case is SNSD Taeyeon, who introduced herself as an Ambassador of Louis Vuitton during an interview with W Korea back in May 2022.
However, in reality, the leader of SNSD is only working closely with Louis Vuitton without any official title, and the brand has never introduced Taeyeon as its ambassador. The female idol is also not often invited to Louis Vuitton events.
Back in late 2021, fans of EXO were enraged to see Dior fixing the title of Sehun for a total of 3 times. In particular, the luxury brand first declared Sehun as its “Global Ambassador”, before fixing it to “House Friend”, and later “House Ambassador”.
Source: Yans
