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Canadian fashion brand blasted for 'Every Colour Matters' shirt

A model wears an Every Colour Matters shirt for the Ports 1961 show during Milan Men’s Fashion Week. <em>(Photo: Getty)</em>
A model wears an Every Colour Matters shirt for the Ports 1961 show during Milan Men’s Fashion Week. (Photo: Getty)

A luxury Canadian fashion brand is in hot water over shirts black models wore in a recent fashion show.

Models who strutted the runway for Ports 1961 during Milan Men’s Fashion Week last Tuesday wore shirts that bore the slogans “Every Colour Matters” and “Only Love Matters,” a tongue-in-cheek play on the Black Lives Matter movement.

In addition to the slogans, when an African-American model opened the show in a sweater that bared the image of a raised, clenched fist (generally associated with black nationalism) — and then later modelled one portraying multi-racial raised fists, people quickly took to social media and slammed the tops as “inappropriate,” saying they exploited the fight for racial equality, particularly since the show took place around the same time as the acquittal of the police officer who fatally shot Philando Castile during a traffic stop last year.

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In a statement on the brand’s Facebook page, they state the collection is a celebration of diversity, strength and optimism.

“Fashion reflects the world around us. In a time of challenge, fear and disillusion, it is the creative person’s role to try to deliver a message of love and hope. For the past several seasons, Milan Vukmirovic has been exploring the urgency of love and the importance of fraternity, unity and solidarity.”

The collection is in part inspired by “African cool-setters and the hip-hop scene in New York in the early ’80s,” and features “an upbeat collection with a very positive message.”

“Brimming with colour and meaning, this collection is a window that opens to the world and defends the richness of difference.”

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The brand further states that the collection is, in its own way, a message of solidarity for the Black Lives Matter movement that began in the street and on social media in 2012.

“The fight against violence and for justice for black people resonates today in an even wider, bigger way. Now, more than ever, EVERY LIFE MATTERS. EVERY COLOUR MATTERS. ONLY LOVE MATTERS.”

Perhaps Vogue writer Nick Remsen clarified it best when he said the collection often felt propped on a message that didn’t quite gel, no matter how well-intentioned:

“… A T-shirt that read ‘Only Love Matters,’ a broadening of the term ‘Black Lives Matter,’ felt, to this writer, troublesome (a movement that big and important and personal to so many should perhaps not help to serve a company’s bottom line). Ditto for a clenched fist on a jumper that opened the show; there are subtler and more sensitive ways to deliver a message of resistance and fairness and acceptance.”

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