Urban Outfitters' Corporate Office Is Having a Racist Holiday Party
What you see above is a portion of the flyer for Urban Outfitters' 2014 office holiday party, which is taking place on Wednesday at the retailer's corporate headquarters in Philadelphia. As you can see, employees are being asked to dress up in some mish-mash of Orientalist signifiers so obviously offensive that two separate Urban employees forwarded the image to us this morning.
Here is the full flyer, which charitably asks that Urban employees bring clothing donations along with their racist costumes.
According to our tipsters, the email was sent to employees this morning via the company's "URBNcommunity" listserv. One tipster tells us that last year's theme was "Winter White and Faux Fur," but this year it looks like they've decided to turn the cultural appropriation up to 11.
Of course, this isn't exactly a surprise—if you had to guess which major clothing retailer would be dumb enough to throw a racist office party in 2014 it probably wouldn't take you very long to go with the company that sold "Navajo panties."
Perhaps Urban Outfitters will learn from their mistakes one day. Or they'll go out of business. It's gonna be one of the two.
We've reached out to Urban for comment and if they respond we'll update this post.