Do you ever wonder what the more obscure slogans on designer T-shirts say? No, me neither - not when it looks sort of cool. Clearly Burton's doesn't worry about this kind of stuff either after it had to pull one of its garments at the weekend because of its fascist message.
The £12 T-shirt with its mix of double French eagles and Cyrillic writing looked like just the kind of thing you would pick up in a T-shirt buying spree. In this case the slogan translates as "We will cleanse Russia of non-Russians!"You can imagine being on the Tube and proudly wearing you T-shirt and seconds later being thumped by some Eastern European who is wondering why you support ethnic cleansing in the motherland.According to the Guardian, the error was pointed out to Burton by a Russian language student."I did mention to the girl as I bought one of the shirts, that it was politically probably quite dangerous. I've spoken to a Russian friend and she said you would be arrested if you wore it in Russia."
Burton's is not the first brand to fall foul of unintentionally offensive text used on their products. There are plenty of examples, among the most amusing of which was Coca Cola's slogan "Coke Adds Life", which translated into Thai as "Coke Brings Your Ancestors Back from the Dead". Nice work.Less amusingly there was Umbro, the sportswear firm and England football kit supplier, which was forced to apologise for a brand of trainer it had named Zyklon, the name of the gas used to murder hundreds of thousands of Jews in Nazi death camps. Umbro changed the name of that shoe after protests by the Holocaust education charity the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.
That didn't stop German industrial giant Siemens, which was eventually forced to abandon plans to register the trademark Zyklon.
Then there was Sony, which dropped its patent for the 'shock and awe' phrase after coming under attack for the move.
Sony was thought to have patented the slogan for use with a series of future console games, although at the time it said it had no definite plans. The title, which is likely to be the lasting one from the war in Iraq, was used to describe the US's intense aerial bombardment of Iraq as part of the coalition's early effort to destroy elements of the Iraqi military and force it to surrender.
Gordon Macmillan
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