Burberry Wants to Make Lynching Fashionable

Burberry is the latest to join the fashion fray for completely inappropriate pieces.

In their latest show for London Fashion Week, they showed a look featuring a hoodie with neck chords tied as a noose.

While many are calling out the label for bringing a negative light to mental illness by glamorizing suicide, to People of Color, nooses represent something completely different.

Namely, the murder of Black people by lynching. More than 4400 African American men, women, and even children were hanged but also burned alive, shot, drowned, and beaten to death by white mobs between 1877 and 1950. The true number may never be known.

So prolific was the practice of lynching here in the United States, there is now an entire Museum and Memorial dedicated to the numerous and brutal murders. Actually located on the site of a former warehouse where Black men, women, and children were enslaved in Montgomery, Alabama, this narrative museum gives the tribute to the victims of the domestic slave trade, racial terrorism, Jim Crow, and so on.

This look that Burberry displayed is also reminiscent of another very public death, Trayvon Martin, who, because he had his hood up walking in the Floridian rain home from school, was publicly murdered. His murder never saw justice for taking his…