Popular women’s clothing company Forever 21 has apologised to Gurmit Singh’s daughter Gabrielle, after she slammed them on her blog.
In the post, which was uploaded last week, she explained she’d been shopping at their 313@Somerset outlet with her mother and younger sister when she noticed they were playing rap music.
“Fine. I don’t mind rap,” she wrote. But the lyrics, which sounded something like “half you bitches like pussy too”, bothered her.
She brushed it off, figuring they were playing a mixed playlist and that the next song wouldn’t be so bad.
But it was.
“The songs got progressively more derogative: more condoning of abuse towards women, more explicit in descriptions of sexual endeavours… more disgusting, if I can put it flatly,” she said.
Gabrielle also explained that she might’ve expected misogynistic rap music to be played by a brand that generally promoted “fellatio and breasts”, but insisted Forever 21 was “not that brand”. Instead, it was a brand that catered to young women and the store, as Gabrielle herself observed while she was there, seemed regularly frequented by families.
“So when your store decides to blast music that screams ‘you have a right to rape her’… and “I’ll only love you if you suck my penis’, I have a problem with that,” she reprimanded, in a post that her famous comedian father later shared on his Facebook page.
In the next paragraphs, Gabrielle continued to drive her point home, even quoting lines from a research article by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
She finished by saying, “thank you for your time. No thanks for your music.”
In a recent update on the now viral rant, Gabrielle revealed the company has apologised for the music, and described the gesture as “pretty cool”, saying it was true that “apologising takes a lot of courage and humility”.
“I usually find it hard to say sorry, and I’m not a big company, only a little girl,” she said.
The company also issued an official statement on the matter explaining that they had a “recommended list (of songs) that should be played in the stores”, Channel NewsAsia reports. It was just that on the day, a member of staff had played his own personal list.
“Our priority is to ensure that (this) is resolved as quickly as possible and that it doesn’t happen again in the future,” Forever 21 wrote.
Well, you better. If founders Mr. and Mrs. Chang — devout Christians who printed Bible verses on shop carriers and t-shirts that read “Jesus <3 you” — hear about this, they’re gonna throw a kimchi fit.
Photo: Flickr
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