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Target's bleakly invisible Pride Month fashions suggest the wrong kind of closet [1]
['Rob Beschizza']
Date: 2025-05-31
The managerials running Target made a show of ditching its diversity and inclusion programs to please Donald Trump. Unfortunately for the company, Target has a distinctive customer base at odds with those politics: foot traffic is down sharply in an ongoing boycott and the company's share price has slumped by nearly a third. The outcome of its latest round of corporate marketing risk-calibration webinars? They're still doing Pride Month, but so invisibly that it evokes a desire not to be seen.
Check out this year's Pride hoodie, as spotted by Ben Siemons on Bluesky. If you look very closely at the drawstrings in the screenshot above, you might notice the phrase "Out and Proud" in colors strategically chosen to evoke the Pride Flag without quite being them.
"Buy a Target Pride scarf that's so vague you're not sure if it's describing being gay or a gardener," Siemons writes.
My favorite is this tote bag. It's as if they assembled an army of marketing PhDs to calculate the precise semiotic minimum of plausible gayness while maximizing plausible deniability.
They really shouldn't have bothered at all. The boss doesn't get it, Forbes writes: "Target CEO Brian Cornell broke his silence in an all-employee memo, which may have done more harm than good in quelling anxiety among Target staff."
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