Zara apologizes, stops selling shirt likened to Holocaust uniform

International fashion chain Zara has apologized and stopped selling a children’s shirt after complaints that the garment evoked uniforms worn by Jewish prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.

The shirt has horizontal blue and white stripes and bears a six-pointed yellow star on the left side of the chest. A zoomed-in view of the picture on Zara’s website shows the word “sheriff” printed on the star.

Nazi concentration camp uniforms tended to have vertical stripes that sometimes were blue, and Jews often were forced to wear a six-pointed yellow star on the left side of the chest.

“We honestly apologize, it was inspired by the sheriff’s stars from the classic Western films and is no longer in our stores,” Zara said in multiple Twitter posts Wednesday. It tweeted dozens of similar replies in various languages to people who had posted objections to the shirt design.

The shirt was pulled six hours after it first appeared in Zara’s online stores, its sales “have been marginal,” and it never was offered in the United States, a company spokeswoman told the Los Angeles Times. “The items will be reliably destroyed,” the company said in a statement.

The Spain-based retailer, owned by clothing company Inditex, has run into a similar problem before: In 2007, it stopped selling a handbag whose pattern included a swastika.

According to the BBC, Zara said at the time that it had sourced the handbag from a third party without having seen the swastika.

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