The fashion industry has been fraught with harassment, abuse and mistreatment, and now, people are giving survivors’ accounts the attention they should have had decades ago.

Nevertheless, Stefano Gabbana continues to vomit out some Bad Opinions. This time, in an interview with Vogue, Gabbana has described sexual harassment as “not violence”.

“It’s not new!” Gabbana said, when they discussed particular allegations about Mark Garnier, a British politician. “Luchino Visconti asked Helmut Berger and Alain Delon to go in the bed… but listen, you decide. It’s true. Everybody knows. After 20 years you say, ‘Ah! He touched my ass!’ It’s not violence, this.”

Continuing with the bizarre assertions, the designer tenuously fell back on being Italian, descended from the Romans: you know, because we’ve got the Roman Empire to thank for calendars, sewer systems and sexual assault. “Who doesn’t do sex? Who doesn’t? It’s a trend,” he said. “Now the trend is sex. But sex is an old story. We are Italian. We came from the Roman Empire. We know very well.” 

Gabbana has in the past made some controversial – more just shitty – comments on everything from politics to equal marriage and designers he assumes are copying him, as well as children born from IVF, who he called “synthetic”.

“For me, political correctness is fake, because you don’t have the power to explain what you really think,” he declared in the Vogue piece.

H/T The Cut