The hunt for exquisite Jade

For a profile of Hong Kong designer Barney Cheng, I did an extensive multiple day interview and shoot, marking the 25th anniversary of his eponymous brand. The popular designer has several celebrity fans, including Michelle Yeoh and model turned actress Celina Jade.

Between her packed film shooting schedule, I interviewed the actress regarding her long-standing collaborations with Cheng and we did several looks featuring Barney Cheng couture and jewellery, as an accompanying piece to the main article. Everything you see in the left picture is from Cheng's design house. While photographer Ruby Law was taking perfect snaps of the perfectly poised Jade, who was studded with rubies and glittering diamonds, I was taking BTS shots in my often blurry phone camera. I posted this picture on social media for my.. 10s and 12s of followers!

What followed was... unprecedented on the account. An avalanche of trolling and hate speech, the likes of which I have never seen, bombarded the page. A mixture of bile filled comments in both Chinese and English. Apparently some... crazy person... in China? In some God-forsaken artery in Kowloon?.... slammed us for the shoot and feature as they hated Celina Jade for dating or breaking up some guy. Allegedly. We would delete the comment and three more would pop up the following day. Someone very unemployed who had time to write near-essays of virulent trolling.

For the record, Jade was a wonderful interview, a thorough professional at the shoot and lovely to work with. So the spewing that we read online was shocking.

We don't know if it was a bot or some aggressive person with severe mental issues, but it was relentless for weeks on end and we had to turn off the comment section on both the official account of the magazine and my personal account. Oyve.

The perils of fame, fandom with a pinch of cray cray.

On the plus side, the normal somnambulism of our social media account has never seen so much fire and ire. ..