Saturday, March 11, 2006

From our fashion correspondent

Oliver Sweeney is the sort of men's shoe company that Bret Easton Ellis mocked in American Psycho. As if to demonstrate their appropriately Batemanesque disconnect from reality, they've adapted an image from the Tiananmen Square massacre to advertise their brand.

Except that, after complaints, they've pulled the ad from all media. What I want to know is, did they bow to complaints from human rights activists, who thought they were cheapening and devaluing the image by using it to sell brogues and Oxfords; or did they worry about not being able to sell said finely-tooled accoutrements in the People's Republic, and succumbed to a gentle word from the Chinese embassy?

And, on similar lines to the Danish cartoons brouhaha, am I right or wrong to put the offending image up here? And why?

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