WTF, Abercrombie & Fitch???Follow

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Sorry, Bert, these T-shirts aren't for kids


Published April 17, 2006


A group of young girls made such a fuss last year about a line of Abercrombie & Fitch shirts that read, "Who needs brains when you've got these?" that the company stopped selling the shirts in November.

Over the last month, Maureen Forte, a 4th grade Chicago Public Schools teacher, has been making her own ruckus--in the media, in her school--about a line of T-shirts that she has seen in Chicago-area malls and believes have been on the market for a few months.

That ruckus has included telephoning several companies to let them know just how their trademarks are being used on the T-shirts.

- One of the T-shirts shows Sesame Street's Bert character chug-a-lugging from a 40-ounce bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. Ernie is wielding what appears to be an automatic weapon.

- Another of the T-shirts shows other members of the adorable Sesame cast, that's Bert, Ernie, Big Bird (sporting a do-rag) and Oscar the Grouch, standing around looking menacing while signs tell you that this intersection is: "DON'TMESSWITME ST." (Yes, that's "wit" and not "with.")

- Yet another T-shirt shows Kellogg's Tony the Tiger staring bleary-eyed over a plate of white powder. Instead of "Frosted Flakes" the cereal depicted here is called "Totally Frosted." A caption warns: "Don't get high on your own supply."

- Still, another shows the big-beaked cuckoo bird from General Mills' Cocoa Puffs cereal sitting amid emerald green buds. He's puffing on something akin to a marijuana cigarette. The brand name on this cereal box is "Loco Puffs." The wording tells you that the contents are "fortified with the good s#@%."

Forte, who is African-American, teaches English as a second language at the predominately Hispanic Sawyer Elementary School in the Gage Park neighborhood. She said she's riled about the T-shirts because she's worried that too many black and Hispanic children are being force-fed these images.

It's a concern she often expresses on her radio talk show, which is where she first heard about the T-shirts. Parents and college students called in to complain about them. They told her they were being sold at The Plaza in Evergreen Park. She stopped by the store last month to see for herself.

"At the time, [Sawyer elementary teachers] were preparing the kids for the ISAT," a standardized test, she told me. "I said [to the store manager], `This is why our kids can't concentrate. This is why the incarceration budget is higher than the education budget.' I said, `This is a disgrace.'"

She told me that before he showed her the door, he told her that the T-shirts were among his best sellers and were designed for adults. (To that I say: Really? Using co-opted SpongeBob and Sesame Street characters as bait?) He later told a newspaper that this was a 1st Amendment issue.

While that may be true, the shirts also raise a trademark infringement issue. Apparently none of the companies knew the $20 T-shirts held their trademarks. That was, not until Forte notified them.

"Obviously the items are being produced illegally," Kirstie Foster, a spokeswoman for General Mills, said last week. "We're working with local law enforcement to trace the manufacturers and sellers of these items and remove them from the marketplace."

Since last month, Forte has written opinion pieces on the subject in local newspapers. And as she has created the stir, the shirts mysteriously have disappeared from that store in The Plaza. They also are no longer being sold in a store she heard about in Markham. She suspects they're still being sold in other Chicago-area stores. As of late last week, they were still available on a Web site.

Why do these shirts upset Forte so much? Why did Abercrombie's shirts upset the young girls who got those shirts pulled?

If I could have reached the designer of the T-shirts, I would have explained that the common thread here is the messages and the images the shirts portray.

This is particularly true of the T-shirts, as the wearers are often the most vulnerable kids who live in neighborhoods where these images don't just exist as paint on cotton.

Strip away the cute cartoon characters, and thugs and gangbangers play these roles in everyday life.

"I find it disturbing that some parents actually go and buy this garbage for their children to wear," Forte said. "That's $20 that can go toward books for a home library. You could open a checking or savings account."

Forte recently saw a pupil at Sawyer walking in the corridor wearing one of the T-shirts. It read, "Nestle's Trick."

The girl had worn the shirt on a day when the dress code was relaxed and no adult had paid attention to it until Forte saw it at the end of the day.

"Her mother later told me that she wasn't aware of how the child got the shirt," Forte said. "She normally watches what her daughter wears. The mom said she destroyed the shirt immediately."

Sounds like that would be the perfect ending for all the T-shirts.

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It's just a f[/cyan]ucking shirt...why the f[cyan]uck do these people insist on getting everything that they don't agree with taken away?

Is that the whole article? Because I don't see where the trademark infringing T-shirts are being sold in Abercrombie & Fitch

"At the time, [Sawyer elementary teachers] were preparing the kids for the ISAT," a standardized test, she told me. "I said [to the store manager], `This is why our kids can't concentrate. This is why the incarceration budget is higher than the education budget.' I said, `This is a disgrace.'"

They blame everyone and everything else but the parents.

Forte, who is African-American, teaches English as a second language at the predominately Hispanic Sawyer Elementary School in the Gage Park neighborhood. She said she's riled about the T-shirts because she's worried that too many black and Hispanic children are being force-fed these images.

Who cares if white kids are being force-fed negative images, right? They're white, so they've got that goin' for them.

Fückin' ridiculous.