When fashion brands fail: H&M and Gucci’s racist design disasters
Major fashion brands have repeatedly released products featuring blatantly racist imagery, sparking widespread outrage and raising questions about how companies with massive design teams could approve such offensive items, according to The Guardian. In January 2018, H&M featured a Black child modeling a hoodie with the slogan “Coolest Monkey in the Jungle”, invoking centuries of racist imagery. The Swedish brand acknowledged that “even if unintentional, passive or casual racism needs to be eradicated wherever it exists,” and shortly after appointed its first global leader for diversity and inclusiveness, Annie Wu.
H&M’s response and systemic problems
Wu, previously H&M’s global manager for employee relations, described the collective reaction as shock, asking, “How could that happen?” However, the Coolest Monkey incident was not H&M’s first offense. In November 2017, the company sold an “Unemployed” T-shirt that was quickly withdrawn. An orange hoodie bearing “Nothing to do. Nowhere to go” similarly trivialized poverty as a fashion statement to be bought for £25.
The financial consequences
Bloomberg reported H&M was closing its highest number of stores in two decades, battling a $4.3 billion mountain of unsold stock, not helped by culturally insensitive products being withdrawn from sale. Wu acknowledged that “mistakes will always be made on one level or another” while insisting they had “put a lot of different processes in place to mitigate that as much as possible.”
Gucci’s blackface sweater
Gucci apologized for its polo neck jumper and balaclava combo featuring a cut-out around the mouth outlined with thick red lips labeled “Blackface.” Twitter user Rashida wrote, “Balaclava knit top by Gucci. Happy Black History Month, y’all.” It took 10 hours for Gucci to respond, stating they were “fully committed to increasing diversity throughout our organisation.” Twitter user The Glowboss commented, “If you hire more black people and cultivate an environment where people feel comfortable to speak up, incidents like this will be avoided.”
The diversity problem
H&M’s board consists of four white men and six white women, demonstrating slow change. Georgina Johnson, founder of The Laundry Arts, a programme by and for BAME creatives, argues that “people of my generation have lost interest in the brand.” She notes H&M’s semi-diverse campaigns “largely come off as tokenistic, especially when you repeatedly have the one dark-skinned model somewhere in the motif.” Johnson insists that “unless you have someone inherently part of the creative team to call out their crap and give different viewpoints, i.e., a person of colour, and I would go further to say black folk in large decision-making positions, it’s pointless.”
Conclusion
Fashion brands’ repeated racist design failures demonstrate that apologies and diversity appointments address symptoms rather than causes, requiring fundamental restructuring of who holds decision-making power to prevent future disasters.
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