Fashion retailer Zara made headlines last week when it pulled a children’s shirt from its stores.
Customers complained that the shirt, which was marketed toward 3-year-olds, displayed shocking similarities to the uniforms Jews were forced to wear in the concentration camps of Nazi Europe. With its long sleeves, blue and white stripes and six-pointed yellow star on the breast, the pajama shirt does strikingly resemble a concentration camp uniform.
Shortly after the shirt appeared online for sale, Zara unsurprisingly received a firestorm of comments on social media. The comments accused the retail giant of marketing an extremely insensitive product.
Within hours, the shirt was removed, and Zara issued a hasty apology in several languages via Twitter: “We honestly apologize, it was inspired by the sheriff’s stars from the Classic Western films and is no longer in our stores.”
I can forgive Zara for making a mistake; after all, what fashion retailer hasn’t tried to sell something that someone, at one point in time, found offensive?
But in order for Zara to earn the respect and forgiveness of its customer base, it needs to prove that this appalling display of ignorance will not happen again. So far, I’m not convinced.
Anyone with even the most basic knowledge of World War II should understand how the design of the shirt can easily evoke images of pain and suffering from a terrible time in world history.
It’s shocking that not one person — not one designer, product developer or marketer — recognized the cultural and historic significance of such a design and anticipated the outrage it would inspire.
When you consider how social media users from all around the world immediately reacted in outrage and disgust after viewing the product, it’s difficult to fathom how this could have happened in the first place.
What’s even more difficult to understand is Zara’s apparent inability to issue an apology less offensive than the product itself.
As reported by +972 Magazine, a representative for Zara’s Israeli office (the shirt was available in Zara’s Israeli, French, Albanian and Swedish stores) promised that the product would be quickly removed from shelves and “exterminated.”
It’s fairly obvious that particular term may not have been the wisest choice of words in this situation.
I might be more willing to forgive these slip-ups if the company didn’t face a similar issue in 2007, when Zara was forced to pull a $78 handbag from stores after a customer noticed that the bag was embroidered with green swastikas. To be fair, the bag was produced in India, where the swastika is a symbol of good fortune for Hindus and Buddhists.
However, the 21st century world largely associates the swastika with the Nazi party, and it is internationally recognized as a powerful symbol of hate. Inditex, the multinational clothing company that owns Zara, has more than 6,000 stores in 88 markets.
How could this international powerhouse not have the cultural awareness to predict the kind of reaction that swastikas on a handbag would produce? Why did no one in the company foresee this incredibly predictable outcome?
I’m not saying that Zara engages in discrimination or that it purposefully tried to offend people with these designs. In fact, giant fashion retailers usually have to produce new designs very quickly, so it’s reasonable that certain flaws may slip through the cracks.
This isn’t about malice; it’s about ignorance, though both are inexcusable.
I hope Zara can learn from its mistakes and make an effort to be culturally sensitive, which should be especially important for a company with such a broad international reach.
But if Zara fails to apologize in a way that actually acknowledges the offensiveness of its actions and makes no genuine effort to express remorse to the people who were rightfully pained by the design, then I doubt it has learned anything at all.
Moriah Camenker is a public relations senior. Her columns appear on Tuesdays.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 9/2/2014 under the headline "Zara’s WWII gaffes show insensitivity"]
