August 1st 2023.
Last year Costa made a design for Pride month to show the diversity of their customers and staff. The design was of an express van with a half-naked surfer with mastectomy scars on their chest. This sparked a lot of controversy from certain gender critics, such as Laurence Fox who claimed it promoted the ‘mutilation of healthy young girls’ and called for Costa to be ‘boycotted out of existence’.
Nigel Farage jumped on the bandwagon and suggested it was ‘part of the rottenness’ of corporate culture, while Richard Tice and Julia Hartley-Brewer both called it an attack on ‘healthy breasts’. Mastectomies are a surgical procedure that transgender men can choose to have in order to remove breast tissue from their bodies.
However, the Costa cartoon has been praised by many people online, including Metro columnist Ugla Stefanía Kristjönudóttir Jónsdóttir who said it was a ‘lovely illustration’ and a ‘great advertisement for Costa’. A transgender man even tweeted: ‘As a trans man with similar scars, thank you Costa for the representation.’ Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle also shared his view on the matter in an interview with Julia Hartley-Brewer, saying ‘it is a body that exists and all those things should be celebrated’.
Costa has also defended its mural, with a spokesperson saying: ‘At Costa Coffee we celebrate the diversity of our customers, team members and partners. We want everyone that interacts with us to experience the inclusive environment that we create, to encourage people to feel welcomed, free and unashamedly proud to be themselves. The mural, in its entirety, showcases and celebrates inclusivity’.
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