Prada responds to accusations of racism and insensitivity

Prada apologized for its offensive design. The Italian luxury brand
was under fire from countless shoppers and social media users after a
Facebook post calling out a racist product went viral on Thursday
evening.

The product in question, an animal charm made to look like a monkey
with large lips, is part of Prada’s recent “Pradamalia” collection.
Along with the monkey, which the brand named Otto, According to the
brand’s website, Pradamalia is a “new family of mysterious creatures,”
and is made up of the monkey, named Otto, as well as characters called
Disco, Fiddle, Toto, Scuba and Socks.

Whether or not Prada realized it while creating the characters, the
stylization of Otto’s face was very similar to insensitive “blackface
imagery,” as noted by Chinyere Ezie, staff attorney for the Center for
Constitutional Rights.

Ezie brought attention to the Pradamalia item in a Facebook post on
Thursday afternoon. In her post, Ezie wrote that the had recently
visited an exhibit on blackface in the Smithsonian National Museum of
African American History and Culture, and when she spotted the Otto
product in the storefront of Prada’s location in Soho, New York, she
was “confronted with the very same racist and denigrating #blackface
imagery.”

The post went viral, with many other social media users sharing the
hashtags #StopBlackface, #BoycottPrada and #EndRacism now, which Ezie
had included at the end of the original post. In less than 24 hours,
the message had been shared over 6,700 times.

Prada responded with an apology quite soon after, writing on
Twitter at 11:25 EST on Thursday morning, “#Prada Group abhors racist
imagery. The Pradamalia are fantasy charms composed of elements of the
Prada oeuvre. They are imaginary creatures not intended to have any
reference to the real world and certainly not blackface.”

The brand promised it would remove the offensive items in question,
writing in a follow-up, “Prada Group never had the intention of
offending anyone and we abhor all forms of racism and racist imagery.
In this interest we will withdraw the characters in question from
display and circulation.”