H&M comes under fire for controversial advert

H&M is trending and for all the wrong reasons. The Swedish retail chain has come under fire for its controversial advert shows a young black boy wearing a hoodie emblazoned with slogan Coolest Monkey in the jungle.

Social media was aghast and users went into overdrive over what they perceived to be a 'racist' move by the company.

Controversial

The connotations of it could not be ignored especially since the advert featured three children, each wearing the same hoodies with different prints. The two white children had relatively inoffensive wording on their respective items of clothing. People questioned why H&M thought it would be a good idea to have the black child where the hoodie with race sensitive wordings on it.

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Apology

H&M has removed the image from their website and replaced it with a picture of the hoodie by itself. This shows H&M knows that the image was highly inappropriate and they offered a lukewarm apology in response.

An H&M spokeswoman said: “This image has now been removed from all H&M channels and we apologise to anyone this may have offended.”

See some of the reactions on social media below

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