Spanish retail clothing giant Zara ''honestly'' apologized on Wednesday following an outcry over one of its striped T-shirts for kids that bears a resemblance to a Nazi concentration camp uniform.
It said it withdrew the blue and white striped boy’s shirt bearing a yellow star from its stores.
The shirt, produced in Turkey, was sold in the Spanish retailer's Albanian, French, Israeli and Swedish online stores. It was removed on Wednesday hours after it went on sale.
Zara, which is owned by Spanish company Inditex, flooded Twitter early Wednesday morning with multilingual apologies, insisting the garment was modeled on cowboy sheriffs of the Old West, not on the uniforms Nazis forced Jews to wear in WWII concentration camps nor the infamous yellow stars that Nazis forced all Jewish people to wear in and outside the camps.
‘’The inspiration had to do with the old classic western movies. Obviously we are very attentive to the sensitivity of our customers. we made a mistake in this case,” a spokesperson was quoted as saying.
Earlier, angry consumers took to Twitter and Facebook to question Zara’s decision to sell the t-shirt.
“This is not the first time that Zara has shown its lack of sensitivity on Holocaust issues and it shows that the company has an unfortunate tendency to misuse symbols that are a source of pain and suffering with any knowledge of the history of world war II,” said Efraim Zuroff, the director of the Israeli office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
In 2007, Zara, which maintains a significant retail presence in Israel, was forced to withdraw a handbag from its stores because the design featured swastikas.
More recently, the retailer was embroiled in another controversy when it was accused of racism for selling T-shirts with the slogan 'White is the new black.' "