With a large following of youths, teens, and college students who tend to gravitate to the colorful designs and quirky statements, Urban Outfitters is a retail store with more than 170 locations across the world. Known for its fashion line with a retro, hipster twist blended with irony and humor, the current roster of T-shirt styles marketed towards females incorporates an array of questionable and disturbing pieces of symbolism, which includes the all-seeing eye, anti-religious references, and inverted crosses.
To date, a few examples to consider include the following pieces found on the Urban Outfitters website:
- The Silence + Noise Eyeball Muscle Tee pairs a hypnotic, swirled design with single-eye symbolism.
- The LIFE Death Metal Cropped Tee that mimics the kind of graphic you’d see a Raiders fan wear, you see a couple of inverted (upside-down) crosses used for the ‘T’s in the word ‘Death Metal.’
- Another shirt design that incorporates an inverted cross is the Petals And Peacocks The End Tee.
- For nearly $100, you could be the proud owner of the Orphan’s Arms 1954 Sweatshirt, which features a statement that mentions the Devil.
- The Blackstone Butterflies Tee offers a collection of butterflies as the front design, which some may say serves as a representation of Monarch mind control programming. Butterflies play an important role in the trauma and mind games that ‘handlers’ are thought to use on women as a way to control their mind and actions.
- The Mystic Rays Sweatshirt not only has an all-seeing eye at the center, but the rest of the design also has a bit of pyramid or triangle imagery to it.
- The Blackstone Hell Yeah Muscle Tee doesn’t say much, but what it does say is a mouthful.
The above creations aren’t the first time that Urban Outfitters has made waves with consumers by selling T-shirts that use Illuminati-related symbolism and other offensive or problematic images. The retail company has been at the center of many different controversies that have also hit a nerve with various ethnicities and members of religious communities in the past. The company has been accused of perpetuating stereotypes and marketing products that could be considered blasphemous or anti-religious.
Sometimes, the messages they send are in clothing designs, such as the ‘Eat Less’ T-shirt geared towards women which was criticized for supporting a pro-anorexia message. While the shirt design was pulled from the website, you were still able to purchase it at the stores. Young women seeing such messages on a consistent basis have a higher chance of believing such statements. In some cases, it is not uncommon to see companies use clothing as a way to program targeted consumers.
For example, in 2004, the company received an estimated 250,000 emails regarding a game called Jesus Dress Up – a magnetic refrigerator set that allowed users to place different kinds of clothing on a Jesus upon the cross. Some of the clothing included a women’s dress, ballerina outfit, and even a full Devil suit with forked tail and set of horns. Urban Outfitters identified the game as one of the company’s most popular Christmas-related toy, and that they did not intend to offend customers. However, marketing a ‘game’ that allows people to dress Jesus in a Devil costume is completely disrespectful and offensive.