The Spanish fashion retailer Zara apologized for and pulled a kids' T-shirt from its website on Wednesday after many on social media pointed out it strongly resembled a Nazi concentration camp uniform.
The company listed the "sheriff" shirt on its website for $22 as part of a fashion collection. But the long-sleeved shirt featured a yellow star to the left of the chest, which is reminiscent of the six-point Jewish Star of David. In some camps during the Holocaust, Jews were marked by a yellow triangle over a red triangle to form the Star of David; in others, a yellow star identified them as Jewish.
Zara, which is owned by the Spanish company Inditex, said the shirt was designed to be part of a Wild West clothing theme and the star was intended as a sheriff's badge. You can faintly distinguish the word "sheriff" emblazoned onto the badge.
[img src="http://admin.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Buchenwald_Prisoners_83718.jpg" caption="Dutch Jews wearing prison uniforms marked with a yellow star and the letter "N," which stands for Netherlands, at Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, 1941. " credit="United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
After several hours, the company said the item had been removed from the website and taken out of circulation due to the similarity, and apologized to customers. (A cached version of the listing can still be viewed here.) The company's Israeli office also issued an apology to customers.
@eylanezekiel We honestly apologize, it was inspired by the sheriff’s stars from the Classic Western films and is no longer in our stores
— ZARA (@ZARA) August 27, 2014
The outcry largely took part on social media. An Israeli blogger posted on 972 Magazine about the design, and the subsequent apology, early Wednesday morning.
"I have no words to express the disrespect that your company has showed by producing an item for children that clearly and unequivocally brings up the uniform that Jews had to wear during the Holocaust," Loren Raccah, an Italian Facebook user, wrote on Zara's company page.
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Post by Loren Raccah.
Others simply pledged to never shop at Zara again.
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Post by Noa Tayouri.
In 2007, the company was forced to withdraw handbags after a customer noticed a swastika sketched into the fabric. The company claimed that the Nazi symbol had gone unnoticed.
#Zara collection a few years ago. The Swastika flowery, summery bag. Now, the Yellow Star comfy, trendy shirt. Yuk ! pic.twitter.com/e3OOnyl2a6
— Nat Saf (@Saffronian) August 27, 2014
"Creating a shirt for children that looks like the garments Jews were forced to wear in concentration camps -- after you had made a similar error a number of years ago, placing a swastika on a handbag -- suggests that your true feelings may be seeping through the cracks," Danielle Fraenkel, a Facebook user from Rochester, New York, wrote, accusing the company of harboring antisemitism.
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"Had the symbol been seen we would not have sourced that particular handbag," Zara spokesperson Susan Suett told the BBC at the time. "As a precaution, we've obviously taken the decision to immediately withdraw the item from sale on being informed of this particular bit of information."