<p>This seems to be not uncommon.
Offering inappropriate clothing for children & teens.
Urban Outfitters isnt the only offender.
A& F, American Eagle, Target and Walmart have all offered highly inappropriate clothing.</p>
<p>OMG. Like a lot of you, I’m not really old enough to recall the event, but like EK I spent my high school years soaking up a lot of CSNY, and I also could read, so the shootings made an impression on me even so. This is just shameful.</p>
<p>I suppose the event is so far in the past that most kids today might not get the inappropriateness of it. I suspect they would get it if the shirt displayed the WTC instead.</p>
<p>ETA: In case you’re interested, or just want a reminder, here are Neil Young’s liner notes on “Ohio”:
<p>To your question, “Do marketing types think about nothing but $?”, the answer is YES. One of the functions of business specialization is to make everyone think that the ethical questions are “someone else’s department”, with the common result that they are either never addressed or wind up in the laps of a few people with no ethical limits whatsoever. So it isn’t just marketing people, but yes.</p>
<p>Urban Outfitters says they were selling faded, frayed sweatshirts and this one happened to look like it had bloodstains. I find the story plausible. Faded, frayed clothing is a thing. And why would Urban Outfitters intentionally sell bloody sweatshirts? Their target market has never heard of the Kent State killings. </p>
<p>It would be like a retailer in the 1970s trying to sell clothing alluding to 1920s-era events to teenagers. Why would we have bought anything like that? It would have meant nothing to us.</p>
<p>1) That doesn’t look like any wear pattern I have ever seen, nor does it match up with the other “vintage” items that they have on their website, which are all pretty uniformly faded.</p>
<p>2) I am not sure the Kent State ever sold a significant number of red sweatshirts, their colors are blue and gold.</p>
<p>3) It’s Kent State.</p>
<p>So they went out and made a bunch of red sweatshirts from a school whose colors are blue and red, faded them in a way unlike the rest of their faded products so that it looked like blood spatter, and that they only did this for a school nationally known for being home to a massacre. Which is more likely, that they did this accidentally or that someone did it on purpose?</p>
<p>
No, but their target market would like to provoke and shock those older generations that HAVE heard of Kent State. Clothing meant to shock is rarely meant to shock the person wearing it!</p>
<p>I’m old enough to remember Kent State vividly. I graduated from HS in 1971. After the event, plenty of older people said the Guard unit did the right thing. Sometimes I think “They Were Expendable” should be a motto of our generation, not just a movie title. :(</p>
<p>Some of us were just talking about Kent State before church on Sunday. I cam in on the conversation and didn’t know what prompted it. Maybe this. </p>
<p>I remembered the shootings from my childhood, but at the time, it didn’t make much of an impact since so much violence was on the news every night. On one of the anniversaries of the Kent State shootings, NPR ran a minute by minute account of what happened. Horrifying! Why were they facing student protestors with live ammunition?</p>
<p>If that sweatshirt made it into production, I assume it would make me physically ill to see what ideas get nixed.</p>
<p>If I read correctly on a financial web site (where people were talking about dumping Urban Outfitters stock on principle because of this) there was only one of these sweatshirts available and the person who purportedly bought it already put it up on Ebay for auction. Someone at Urban must have a screw loose. </p>
<p>I was in college at the time of the Kent State shootings and still have images in my mind of some of the iconic pictures from that day. I can still even name some of the victims because they were from my area. This was simply beyond horrifying to think of law enforcement officers in the country shooting college students.</p>
<p>Upfront–I do think it’s in poor taste and should never have been done.
But it is a big statement about censorship,protest, war and government if those wearing it have any inkling about what it means. It appears crass but the “remember Kent State” message is loud and clear.
When the 9/11 version comes out it’ll be just as tasteless but perhaps the view of it will be different because more people will have actually experienced the event and have different feelings about it.</p>
<p>Ha - I know half the people in that article. And there isn’t all that much that’s controversial. So they use sophisticated taste tests to figure out what people want, and then give it to them. What should they do, not bring out products people want? </p>
</p>