Hollister ‘Models’ Taunt Customers At A Store Opening In South Korea

by Samantha Randazzo | 5:49 pm, September 9th, 2012

As we’ve mentioned in the past, the Styleite offices are right next door to a Hollister flagship. This means that every morning on our way to work, we have to awkwardly push past the slow-moving tourists on Broadway in order to avoid smacking into the shirtless teenage “models” that are always congregated just outside its (excessively fragrant) threshold. Although this is irritating, it’s no more than a minor annoyance. But it seems that the mall chain’s employees caused a much bigger disturbance at a store opening in South Korea last week.

According to koreaBANG, Hollister flew American models in to help publicize the opening, but things quickly went sour when the models started making fun of Asians. Some exposed their middle fingers in pictures taken with customers. That’s already beyond rude, but it gets worse. One of them uploaded a photo of himself squinting and making peace signs to his Twitter account, and captioned it “The face says it all hahaha #Seoul”. A friend responded, “please look at how many Asians liked that picture…impressive”. The model’s response? “Hahahaha they ruhhvvvv itttt!”

But they certainly don’t “ruhhvvvv” his racist sense of humor — in fact, many South Korean Hollister customers reportedly want to boycott the chain. The employees were fired, and Hollister posted this apology on its Facebook page:

“In summary, the company terminated the couple of associates involved. On behalf of our more than 80,000 associates around the world who cherish our core values and our culture of diversity and inclusion, we sincerely apologize for the offense caused by these unauthorized, ill-considered actions.”

Check out the photos below and tell us what you think. Are you offended?

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[koreaBANG via HuffPost Style]

Hollister Hollister models Racism wtf

Anna

Wrong Picture Posted.
Middle Finger in here. http://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/71826380.html
sus

idiots.
ryk

i think the most ironic part is that the guys who thought it hilarious to be racist to an entire country aren’t even moderately attractive to begin with.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_KDICKBONRNKMR46Q6GEWPQUD64 edc_74

I see an asian girl named KristenKwok in the twitter feed pictured, thinks vince is cute. Sad and funny at the same time. It will continue to happen while there’s white dudes and the asian girls that love them still around. lol!
jd875321

Hollister is lame. A&F has repeatedly offended in the past particularly
to non-blondes and Asians. They are closing more than 100 stores domestically,
have done poorly since 2008, so now they go abroad as a solution, but forget to
leave their racist corporate culture at home. Are they complete morons? Yes,
they are. They need to just go away. Here is a response to that model.
http://1bamblr.tumblr.com/ Do the public a favor and spread it around. Drop thousands
of copies of it at their stores. This is the real image of Hollister and
A&F.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002711868182 Mark Jacobs

oh so now we are led to expect that these “young dudes” are hired for their brains and not just the image they portray. The manager should be fired for not properly selecting the models they sent over and for not providing proper training to them. They are after all , just young dumb assess.
kimberley

mentally retarded
Stephanie

Seoul is awesome, and has its own style already. It doesn’t need Hollister OR their ethnocentric, culturally deprived models. No wonder why Americans have a bad name….

Hollister ‘Models’ Taunt Customers At A Store Opening In South Korea

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