Urban Outfitters have now offended another load of people.....

I'm starting to wonder if someone at at Urban Outfitters is desperate to loose their job. So not only have we got the insane financial losses suffered by the company in recent months, the Irish T-shirts, the legalize gay T-shirt thing, the Navajo print debate and the underage model storm - we now have the Jewish T-shirt issue.

This appeared on the online rails at UO....

You'll notice that in the second picture - the star has been removed. This is because the company actually admitted they could see a resemblance between the graphic on the T and the star that the Jewish community were forced to wear during the holocaust - they then removed it.

The company (a Danish company called Wood Wood who made the T-shirt) released this statement after they received a series of complaints from various organisations about the star :

'Dear friends,
As some of you are aware, several news sites have been writing about our ‘Kellog’ T-shirt, which feature an image of a six-pointed star, allegedly similar to the yellow badge Jews were ordered to wear by the German nazis.

First of all the graphic is not the Star of David, and i can assure you that this is in no way a reference to judaism, nazism or the holocaust. The graphic came from working with patchwork and geometric patterns for our spring/summer collection ‘State of Mind.
 
However, when we received the prototype of this particular style we did recognize the resemblance, which is why we decided not to include the star patch on the final production T-shirt. I assume the image people have reacted to comes from Urban Outfitters´ web site. This must be a photograph of an early sample, which is of course an error. Here is the actual T-shirt as it is in stores.

I am sorry if anyone was offended seeing the shirt, it was of course never our intention to hurt any feelings with this.'

The T-shirt now appears online minus the star.  To be fair, this seems a bit like a genuine mix up and one which the company did try to fix but not before UO decided to post a picture of the T-shirt. At least the company pulled the image but you have to wonder if there hadn't been a series of complaints about it - would it have been pulled?

One of the complaints came from the ADL (Anti Defamation League of Philadelphia) and went a little something like this :

'Barry Morrison, ADL Regional Director, wrote to Richard Hayne, Chairman, President and CEO of Urban Outfitters, about a t-shirt offered by the company which is associated with the yellow Star of David symbol Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Europe. Morrison said, “We find this use of symbolism to be extremely distasteful and offensive, and are outraged that your company would make this product available to your customers.'