It’s been just over a year since H&M apologised for an advertising image featuring a black boy modelling a hoodie with the slogan “Coolest Monkey in the Jungle”. The Swedish brand issued the following statement at the time: “We have got this wrong and we agree that, even if unintentional, passive or casual racism needs to be eradicated wherever it exists.” Shortly after, the company appointed its first ever global leader for diversity and inclusiveness, Annie Wu.

At the time of the scandal, Wu was H&M’s global manager for employee relations.Born in Taiwan and raised in New York, how did she feel about the Coolest Monkey hoodie? “I think for all of us it was more shock, like everyone else: how could that happen? But then also, how do we then tell the world that this is not who we are, and that it was completely a mistake?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gucci’s ‘Blackface’ polo neck and balaclave combo. Photograph: Gucci

The demand for a more transparent fashion industry is making it very difficult for brands to make these “mistakes”. It’s not just H&M – Zara, too, has courted controversy in recent years after selling items emblazoned with Pepe the Frog and swastikas, among other missteps. It’s not just the high street either: luxury brands Prada, Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana have all had high-profile incidents where, between them, they have managed to alienate more than half the world’s population. Most recently, Gucci apologised for its polo neck jumper and balaclava combo, featuring a cut-out around the mouth outlined with thick red lips that was labelled “Blackface”. “Balaclava knit top by Gucci. Happy Black History Month y’all,” wrote Twitter-user Rashida. It took 10 hours for Gucci to respond, also on Twitter: “We are fully committed to increasing diversity throughout our organisation and turning this incident into a powerful learning moment for the Gucci team and beyond,” read their statement. “If you hire more black people and cultivate an environment where people on all levels of the company feel comfortable to speak up, incidents like this will be avoided,” commented The Glowboss (@VanessaVeasley).

But the Coolest Monkey incident was not the first time H&M offended. In November 2017, the company sold a T-shirt with the slogan “Unemployed” on it, which was quickly withdrawn. While Wu agrees that H&M has a “global responsibility” as an employer, she says: “We are still a fashion company, so we do want to push the envelope a little bit to catch these trends and things that still happen.”

Therein, perhaps, lies the problem. Mainstream brands are not in a position to be edgy. An orange hoody bearing the slogan “Nothing to do. Nowhere to go” – also from H&M – is simply trivialising the poverty and hardship that for many is a reality, not a fashion statement to be bought for £25 a pop.

Last January, Bloomberg reported that H&M was set to close its highest number of stores in two decades, citing it as a move from physical shops to e-commerce. The brand has also been battling with a $4.3bn mountain of stock which did not pass “chemical tests” – not helped by culturally insensitive products being withdrawn from sale. Add to that the outcry over the practice of burning this stock and you can see how averting another “coolest monkey in the jungle” disaster is high on their list of priorities.

“Mistakes will always be made on one level or another,” says Wu. “We have put a lot of different processes in place to mitigate that as much as possible but this topic of inclusion and diversity is just so broad. We’ve done what we can and we continue to learn throughout this entire process.”

H&M do, however, run campaigns that are inclusive in terms of models’ race, age, gender and sexual orientation. Their Divided: Love for All collection, launched last year, supported the United Nations’ Free & Equal campaign and will be repeated this year. They have nine brands catering to different sectors of the market and plans to retrain the CEO and 1,000 managers. And despite a drop in profits plans for the sixth consecutive quarter, they still have plans to expand in 2019 across all brands.

Yet according to Georgina Johnson, founder of The Laundry Arts, a London-based programme by and for BAME creatives, it may be too late. H&M can push the envelope all they want but, the 26-year-old says, “people of my generation have lost interest in the brand itself. A few large brands and smaller brands are being quite flexible with the image they are building and how they are engaging with contemporary audiences. H&M may try to dot around a few semi-diverse campaigns each year, but largely they come off as tokenistic, especially when you repeatedly have the one dark-skinned model somewhere in the motif.”

The first step, surely, is to ensure that the decision-makers and creative teams at H&M are representative of their global markets. The board of directors at H&M is made up of four white men and six white women, so some things are proving slow to change. The answer is not big statements, but working with small communities, young individuals and building conversations around the identities of the consumer.

“[But] unless you have someone inherently part of the creative team to call out their crap and give different viewpoints – ie a person of colour, and I would go further to say black folk in large decision-making positions – it’s pointless,” Johnson says. “If they are not keeping their ear to the ground, they will be left behind.” Whether that is enough, remains to be seen.