Trevor Fleming, a former senior art director for Lululemon, was fired earlier this week after netizens took offense to a t-shirt design he shared on social media. The front of the $60 tee features bat-winged chopsticks, whereas the back of the shirt has a bat-winged Chinese takeout box that says “no thank you.” The article’s name, “bat fried rice,” is a reference to the COVID-19 novel coronavirus’ suspected origin prior to the human outbreak of the contagious disease.
Though it was California artist Jess Sluder (@deadringer) who designed the t-shirt, Fleming’s apparent applauding of the t-shirt via a link in his Instagram bio caught a number of individuals’ attention.
The athletic apparel retailer has also issued a public apology over the incident.
“At lululemon, our culture and values are core to who we are, and we take matters like this extremely seriously," Lululemon spokesperson Erin Hankinson said in a statement provided to USA Today. "We apologize that an employee was affiliated with promoting an offensive t-shirt … The image and the post were inappropriate and inexcusable and we do not tolerate this behaviour."
"We acted immediately, and the person involved is no longer an employee of lululemon," the company statement noted.
Commenting on the t-shirt and Fleming’s promotion of the item, Twitter user Kamauri Yeh argued that the shirt is yet another example of the discrimination that had been endured by the Asian-American community since the novel coronavirus was identified in Wuhan, China.
Sluder has since made their 2,800-follower Instagram profile private, but did provide a response in the comment section of the post in question prior to doing such.
“The shirts were never produced and the intent was never to profit from this,” Sluder claimed, despite the t-shirt being advertised for $60. “[Lululemon] and the employee had absolutely no involvement. Of course, at this point, I am seeing all of this from a different perspective. The racial aspect of this honestly had not occurred to me, which is clearly something I need to explore further. I apologize sincerely for any offense. Be safe and healthy.”
News of the tone-deaf tee design comes alongside World Health Organization (WHO) spokeswoman Fadela Chaib’s Tuesday reassurance to the press that “all available evidence suggests the virus has an animal origin and is not manipulated or constructed in a lab or somewhere else” - a scenario about which some have speculated amid skepticism over the WHO’s interactions with China when the virus was first identified.
That skepticism has led US intelligence agencies to investigate whether COVID-19 was unleashed due to an accident within the Wuhan Institute of Virology.