Italian American singer Gwen Stefani has been around the cultural appropriation track a few times.
She’s faced criticism in the past for her choices to dress and act like other cultures over the span of her music career.
Most recently, in an interview with Allure magazine, Gwen was asked about her current thoughts on her 2008 Harajuku Lovers perfume, which she launched during a time where the singer’s image took a lot of inspiration from Japan’s Harajuku subculture.
It has been criticized in recent years for cultural appropriation.
Her response was, well, shocking and a little confusing. She began with telling a story about how her father sometimes traveled to Japan for work while she was a kid, and how she grew to love the country from there.
"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 told the Allure editor.
Her father would tell her stories about the culture in Japan, which inspired the singer to visit herself when she was an adult.
"I said, 'My God, I'm Japanese and I didn't know it,'" she said.
"I am, you know," she said again.
She continued to explain, calling herself a "super fan" of Japan and the culture.
The No Doubt frontwoman, who recently wore dreadlocks in a new music video, elaborated on how she feels when people comment on her using other cultures in her art, and for profit.
"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," she told Allure.
"I think it was a beautiful time of creativity … a time of the ping-pong match between Harajuku culture and American culture," she explained about that era in her career.
"[It] should be okay to be inspired by other cultures because if we're not allowed then that's dividing people, right?"
Gwen — who, according to Allure, has brought in more than $1 billion in retail sales with brands that include her Japanese-inspired products — has said she considered herself to be many different kinds of people.
She told the interviewer that she sees herself as "a little bit of an Orange County girl, a little bit of a Japanese girl, a little bit of an English girl."
She is referring to the Latinx and Hispanic communities of Anaheim, California, which is where she grew up.
Gwen’s team did not clarify what she meant by saying that she is Japanese when asked by Allure.
The site director for Allure, Sam Escobar, took to Twitter on Tuesday to reflect on the release of Gwen Stefani's interview, saying the star got "very, uh, honest" with their editor Jesa Marie Calaor.
"In my 6 years at @Allure_magazine," Sam said, "this might be the strangest celebrity interview we’ve published."
