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SHOCK AND HORROR!! MADE UP WORD SCARS YOUNG CHILDREN AT COASTLAND MALL!!

Riiight.

This past Wednesday, Coastland Mall security paid a surprise visit to locally owned boutique Trendy With a Twist to tell them to pack up some of their new merchandise. A line of t-shirts by the international clothing company French Connection United Kingdom had offended the sensibilities of a 15 year-old girl. And what do we do when someone is offended? Censor! Yay!

Mall security, which apparently don’t have much securing to do, approached the boutique’s manager and demanded that the shirts be removed from the store. Thankfully, Trendy With a Twist owners Tami and John Magocs had a nice simple answer for them: “no.”

The t-shirts causing such an undeserved stir are the simple and iconic emblem of the moderately upscale French Connection line. Printed on white shirts with black lettering (and vice versa), they bear four letters that strike fear into the hearts of good PG-13 children everywhere: F-C-U-K.

“The have just taken the acronym for their company name and put it on a t-shirt,” explained Tami Magocs. “When you take this word, “fcuk,” it’s not even phonetically a word.”

In fact, these scandalous t-shirts are really old news. While the Magocs haven’t sold them previously at the Coastland Center and to their knowledge no other store there carries them, the FCUK campaign launched an entire decade ago in 1997. Its initial use as a logo for the company came after faxes sent between headquarters in Hong Kong and Britain used the abbreviations FCHK and FCUK to differentiate between the two offices. The letters caught the eye of an ad exec, and the rest is fashion history.

And if the t-shirts caught the eye of a sheltered and dyslexic Coastland customer, then that is exactly what they are supposed to do.

“We had them for a while in Fort Myers and they actually sold out,” said Magocs, “but no complaints there,” she added.

In Naples the shirts have been one of Trendy With a Twist’s best selling items as of late (no doubt the publicity hasn’t hurt), and Magocs said she has a new shipment that will include men’s tees coming in this week.

But who knows? Maybe a misspelled four-letter “f” word really will be the downfall of our community’s family values and moral rigor. Maybe gross profanity comes disguised in trendy t-shirt form. That bit of cotton could be the loose thread that unravels our lofty principles and leaves our children scarred for life. Or maybe it’s just a t-shirt.