El Chapo Wears Jewish Fashion Designers, and You Can Too
The Barabas advertisement. Image by Screen Shot
The Barabas advertisement.
A schmatta, it’s not.
Infamous Mexican cartel boss Joaquín Guzmán — better known as El Chapo — is in the news after a widely publicized interview with Sean Penn in magazine led to his capture (again). In the days that followed, photos of the actor and the drug kingpin circulated around the world.
According to the Guardian, this was an incredible stroke of luck for two Iranian-Jewish brothers in Los Angeles. In one photo with Penn, Guzmán is wearing an ornate gray-and-blue striped button-down shirt that’s overlaid with a black paisley-ish pattern designed by the brothers’ company, Barabas.
“We’re excited because he could buy anything, he could buy Versace, any other brand, but to choose our brand, our designs!” owner Shawn Esteghbal told the paper.
The phrase “Most Wanted Shirt” touts Barabas’ homepage, which depicts the famous photo — of a mustachioed Guzman, wearing Barabas’ “Fantasy” button-down shirt shaking hands with a scruffy Penn — accompanied by a photo of an equally scruffy model sporting the shirt same shirt as Guzman, in what can safely be assumed a smaller size.
Rolling Stone has also released a video of Guzmán’s response to Penn’s questions. In it, El Chapo wears a similar shirt, also by Barabas.
Perhaps ironically, Barabas’s motto is “Good words. Good thoughts. Good deeds.”
Whether or not this unexpected publicity will advance the brothers’ mission remains a head scratcher — but it has undoubtedly been good for business: The shirt, which retails for $128, is currently on backorder.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
