"Fashion can be really racist, looking at the clothes of other cultures as costumes...That’s mundane and it’s old hat. Let’s break down some barriers,” Alexander McQueen was once quoted as saying. But employees at the late designer's flagship store in the Meatpacking District apparently never heard that one, and are now facing a lawsuit from a former security guard accusing them of spewing racist vitriol during the two years he monitored the store.
22-year-old Othman Ibela, a native of Gabon, allegedly endured various racist "jokes" lobbed by the store's salespeople, the Post reports. According to the complaint, which was filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Ibela said one clerk in particular “repeatedly made jokes about me running nude in Africa with a spear in my hand,” while the store's manager asked him “why Muslims were always killing people.”
He added also that the employees shunned black customers when they entered the showroom—except, of course, for Beyoncé, who was given the star treatment.
The staff denies the allegations and an employee who answered the phone told us that the store's manager, Catherine Flynn, is currently on vacation.
