The British version of the Swedish company’s website used a black child to model a sweater that read “coolest monkey in the jungle” and was hit with an immediate backlash as the social media crowd noted that other sweaters were modeled by white children. The company removed the offending image and issued an apology, but the damage was already done. The low-cost clothier is currently wearing 86 percent negatives due to the sheer number of comments directed at its Twitter page. “Have you lost your damned minds?” New York Times columnist Charles Blow asked the company, which seems like a fair question. Other black Twitter users, many of them artists such as @Mimicgawd, re-imagined the ad by replacing the text on the sweater with slogans like “Coolest Kid in the racist ass H&M catalog.” –Hugo Guzman
Republished from 30dB