Urban Outfitters might want to consider investing in some hardcore sensitivity training, because their brand is starting to anthropomorphize into everyone’s crazy uncle (read: “crunkle”), whose off-handed, racist comments frequently ruin everything.
Perhaps UO is just “set in its ways.” You may recall the time when their Navajo-branded flasks and clothing somehow offended the actual Navajo Nation, which later sued (and won) for copyright infringement. Then there was that other time the Irish caught on to UO’s distasteful St. Patty’s Day t-shirts, despite their play on the common, almost accepted stereotype.
This whirl around the unintentional merry-go-hate, Urban Outfitters has pissed off the Anti-Defamation League for a shirt design that, according to them, resembles the star of David, more specifically, the symbol that the Nazi’s used to mark victims of the holocaust (pictured right, you philistine).
While Urban Outfitters hasn’t commented on the controversy yet, the shirt’s manufacturer, Dutch label Wood Wood, has issued an apology, stating that the design (which was sewed onto a yellow shirt, nonetheless) is nothing more than “patchwork and geometric patterns.”
Apparently, the manufacturer anticipated the ADL’s strong reaction and they maintain that the pattern was removed from the item before being released. But Urban Outfitters seems to have missed that memo and posted the original shirt on their online catalog sometime around National Holocaust Remembrance Day .
To top it off, the shirt costs $100.
I can think of countless cheaper ways to be offensive.
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Chris Lipczynski
