Dutch spa and body care brand, Rituals, is under fire today for its recent campaigns, through which different white models are seen in various cultural and traditional Asian dress and settings.

Fashion blogger Bryanboy called out the brand on his Instagram earlier today when he got here across the campaigns while on the airport. “Dear @RitualsCosmetics,” he writes on the post, “will you please tell your marketing department in addition to your corporate executives to look up what ‘cultural appropriation’ means? Are y’all so detached from today’s political climate? It’s 2018.”

Bryanboy goes on to write down: “When you think your executives within the Netherlands may get away with putting a blue-eyed white girl in an Asian lewk, you’re improper. That is just straight up cultural theft for marketing purposes. Profiting from a culture that doesn’t belong to yours. Using Asian sensibilities to advertise products but an Asian model is clearly unfit of working with.”

The campaign images can be found across the brand’s website. Product collections with names including “Namasté,” “Holi,” “Completely satisfied Buddha,” and “Samurai,” all include imagery of white models wearing traditional Asian costume. This campaign comes at a time when, despite continued calls for increased diversity, 67.5 percent of models who walked the runway for Fall 2018 fashion weeks were white. In 2016, The Fashion Spot’s annual study reported that of all of the models featured in Spring 16 fashion campaigns, only 4% were Asian.  

Rituals, a brand founded by Dutchman Raymond Cloosterman in 1999, was created with the aim of constructing a brand based on European interpretations of the “wisdom and ancient traditions of Asian cultures” including that of India, China and Japan. Given this, these recent campaign images aren’t surprising, but that on no account makes it acceptable. We expect higher next time.