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Gucci Pulls 'Blackface Jumper' Amid Criticism
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Today in 'Are You F***ing Kidding Me, White Capitalism?'

By Petr Navovy | News | February 7, 2019

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Header Image Source: BBC

You have to wonder what world some people live in.

Consider Gucci. The $12.4 billion luxury clothing brand and tentpole of opulent consumer capitalism has under its employ an army of top-end professionals who work to ensure that its products stay consistent with the burnished image that it has created for itself. Elite designers and product testers who do everything they can to maintain the picture of wealth and prestige built upon the backs of exploited sweatshop labour hidden out of sight. Yet even these slick professionals mess up royally sometimes.

Because, how? Just, how? How in the holy hell does this pass through all those tightly controlled filters to end up on a shelf in 2019:

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The recently released Gucci ‘balaclava jumper’ has naturally faced an entirely reasonable backlash, and Gucci have subsequently pulled the product and issued an apology.

Blackface is a dehumanising racist practice the scars of which have not even begun to fade. Yet some people are so insulated from the world that the thought that a product of theirs might resemble something so egregious apparently does not even enter their head until after external criticism is made. There are actual sitting politicians who are admitting to wearing blackface as a joke in the 1980s. This is not something out of ancient history. With the monstrous, industrial, systemic global structures of centuries of racism in some cases barely disassembled, at some point the lines between ignorance and active malice begin to fade.

This is not the first incident of a top-end fashion brand getting into hot water over a shocking design choice either. It was only a month or so ago that Prada was forced to confront its own brand of ignorance when it released their modern day blackface accessories.

Company uses cheap, inhuman-condition labour to market an overpriced, ugly, racist jumper, the problematic nature of which they don’t even see until it’s out on shelves. Boycott them for every damn step of that process. And then overthrow this white supremacist capitalism that spawned it.

(Source: BBC)