#ArmaniCaptions

About

#ArmaniCaptions is a Twitter hashtag accompanying various photographs of black celebrities who are intentionally misidentified as another seemingly unrelated black actor of the opposite gender, in a similar vein to troll quote image macros. The hashtag was adopted by the Black Twitter community in November 2013, after the Italian fashion house Armani shared an Instagram photograph confusing actress Alfre Woodard with actor Idris Elba.

Origin

On November 18th, 2013, the official Armani Instagram^[10] feed posted a photograph of actress Alfre Woodard at the 5th annual Governors Awards (shown below). After several Instagram users pointed out the error, Armani amended the caption.

Spread

Immediately after Armani shared the photo, the African American culture blog The Root^[9] published an article containing a screenshot of the gaffe, criticizing the fashion company for confusing two black people of different sexes. On the same day, Twitter users began tweeting photos of intentionally misidentified black celebrities with the hashtag “#armanicaptions.”

In the coming days, several news sites reported on the Armani Instagram incident, including The Grio,^[5] Vibe,^[6]UpRoxx,^[8] Complex,^[2] Jezebel^[3] and IBI Times.^[4] According to the Twitter analytics site Topsy,^[1] tweets containing the hashtag reached over 12,200 mentions on November 16th (shown below).

Notable Examples

Search Interest

Not available.

External References