Sep 22, 2014 2 min read

The Spanish philosopher George Santayana once served up the admonition that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

It also must be said that those who cannot remember the past – or know precious little about it in the first place – are condemned to looking at the present with no sense of context or proportion, and are also prone to making fools of themselves.

Perhaps no better example of the latter is the clothing retailer Urban Outfitters. After the latest controversy the Philadelphia-based company has stumbled into, we can only assume that no one in the company’s higher echelons ever stayed awake during history classes.

Before an entirely predictable firestorm erupted, the company was peddling on its website a one-of-a-kind pink sweatshirt for $129 with a Kent State University logo that featured holes and what appeared to be bloodstains. It was, the company pointed out, a used item and of uncertain provenance. It was faded from the sun and the red splotches were merely remnants of its original shade.

Maybe so. But a fundamental knowledge that Kent State University, located a two-hour drive from Washington in Kent, Ohio, was the site of the massacre of four students by National Guardsmen during a Vietnam War protest in May 1970 should have led the powers-that-be at Urban Outfitters to think that, well, maybe this is an item that would have been better consigned to the ragbag than the online bazaar. One commentator aptly said it reached “the outer limits of bad taste.”

But, then again, Urban Outfitters has a formidable track record of tone-deaf marketing stumbles, from putting Navajo-labeled clothes on its racks that were not crafted by American Indians and were considered by some to be demeaning and insensitive, to boot. There were also the $100 T-shirts designed with a six-pointed star badge that bore a discomfiting resemblance to the Star of David patches that Jews were forced to wear during the Holocaust. Again, the words “distasteful” and “offensive” were lobbed at the company.

Is this all done for shock value, and toward getting attention by the media, both social and traditional? Perhaps. It could be that the whiff of notoriety makes a $100 T-shirt a more attractive investment. If not, it demonstrates an ignorance of history that is, like the products themselves, truly shocking.