Eva Marcille graced the BET Awards on Sunday night wearing a Michael Costello dress.
Costello has been accused of calling Maxie James, a Black female designer, the “n-word” and other racial slurs.
There’s no denying the former “America’s Next Top Model” winner looked stunning in Costello’s all-white creation. The dress boasted a high leg slit, puffed off-the-shoulder sleeves with and a plunging sweetheart neckline.
But was it in poor taste? Her critics think so.
“We are wearing Michael Costello,” she told Extra’s, Rachel Lindsay.
Lindsay then asked Eva whether she was making a statement by wearing the dress.
“The statement is and is that he is my friend and will always be my friend. I’m about the cancel culture when it comes to, like, canceling police brutality and canceling inequities in pay amongst African-Americans and their counterparts or gender inequality,” she told Lindsay. “But I’m not here for canceling people.”
Maxie James detailed her encounter with Costello:
“He purchased a dress on my website. He then posted the dress the very next day in his showroom with his logo in the background and just like, resold it. My dress was $200 on my website, like $1000 is how much he was selling it for. And I was just so devastated because I was like, just starting.”
She said she tried to reach out to him, but he did not respond. So she posted the picture of the purchase receipt on social media. Costello went off on her in the comments.
“[He] was going off on people in the comments of the PicCollage that I posted. And that is when he was like, ‘Oh, you’re defending that Black…’ you know, ‘blah blah blah.’ So that’s where it started from.”
The designer says his bullying did not end there.
“So like a year later I go to a fabric store and I see him. I instantly notice him but he did not notice me at first. I went to go sit down, and the fabric store owner came up to me and was like ‘Oh Maxie, it’s gonna be another 30 minutes until your rolls of fabric are ready.’ So I think once he heard my name is when it registered, like, ‘Oh, that’s her.’ So he comes up to me, I’m like, sitting down, and he comes up to me and he’s like, ‘Oh I remember you. You’re that Black n*gger bitch that tried to sabotage my business.'”
