Louis Vuitton Launches ‘Jamaica-Impressed’ Sweater, However Will get Colours Flawed and Criticism Rains

Brand crises are not discriminatory; they can affect both large and small businesses if things don’t go as expected.

Grow your business,
Not your inbox

Stay up to date and subscribe to our daily newsletter now!

February 24, 2021 3 min read

This article was translated from our Spanish edition using AI technologies. Errors can occur due to this process.

February wasn’t the best month for the Louis Vuitton brand. At the beginning, a sweater was brought out to honor Jamaica. However, the colors did not exactly match those of the flag of the Caribbean country. Instead of using green, yellow and black, the latter has been changed to red.

The criticism was immediate on social networks. From people failing to explain how a luxury brand couldn’t googling the “flag of Jamaica” to those who defended the design and claimed it might be related to Rastafarian culture.

Image: @ 21Savage, Instagram

Even personalities like Bob Marley’s daughter Cedella shared on her Instagram account what her father would have thought: “Bob says this is the Ethiopian flag @LouisVuitton,” along with a photo of the late singer.

The start

When the 995 pound (approximately 28,000 Mexican pesos) garment went on sale, it was known as the “Jamaican Striped Sweatshirt”. In addition, it was described as “Sweater with a striped design inspired by the national flag of the Caribbean island”, then the word “flag” was changed to “Heritage”.

Louis Vuitton’s Jamaican stripe jumper and Jamaica’s current flag.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to implement diversity as a value rather than a symbol in fashion companies. pic.twitter.com/neg2W3uIE3

– @PAM_BOY (@pam_boy) February 2, 2021

After the wave of comments, the brand decided to withdraw the product from their website (which shows the link as a 404 error) and apologized to The Guardian.

“We apologize deeply for the mistake in the description of our website and have corrected it. The sweater belongs to the spring-summer 2021 season of the men’s collection, armed with the colors green, yellow and red, the colors of the Ethiopian flag, in honor of African independence, including the homage to the culture of Ghana, our designer Virgil Abloh comes from “, explained the company.

However, the damage is done and a brand crisis can be committed by any business regardless of its size. Sometimes the bets that are thrown on the market are not the best or the most thought out, but they are saved so as not to make a similar mistake again.

Image: Louis Vuitton