As you may be aware, on a recent episode of Nathan For You, Nathan Fielder discovered that unfortunately, the maker of the jacket he is seen wearing consistently throughout the series, the Canadian apparel company Taiga, had recently posted a tribute to a Holocaust denier in one of its catalogs. Obviously, Fielder no longer wanted to promote a brand sympathetic to Holocaust deniers. But with no way of knowing what dark secrets other apparel companies were hiding, he went the most obvious route and started his own brand with the super cool name Summit Ice, “the first outdoor-apparel company to promote the true story of the Holocaust.”
Summit Ice wasn’t just a joke for the show, however, as Fielder later revealed on Conan, but a real company with a real website that you can actually buy the jacket from. And people are indeed buying it! Less than two weeks after the episode aired, EW reports that Fielder has already raised $45,000 in proceeds, which he is donating to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting social justice, human rights and genocide awareness.
Executive Director Nina Krieger learned about the campaign only when someone forwarded her a clip of Fielder’s appearance on Conan to discuss his business venture, as well as a link to the Summit Ice website.
“It’s amazing,” she tells EW. “We were surprised, but the VHEC was grateful to be named as the beneficiary. […] The absurdity of a clothing company expressing sympathies for a Holocaust denier has been reframed by Nathan as an opportunity to promote awareness and we would hope further learning about the events and lessons of the Holocaust.”
And Fielder has more than his fair share of high-profile supporters to the cause. In a gallery titled “Celebrities Love Summit Ice!,” the Nathan For You Facebook page posted an assortment of celebrities photographed wearing his jacket. I’m pretty sure nobody but Nathan Fielder could both find a way to mine humor from such a sensitive subject and use it to promote a good cause.
(Via Entertainment Weekly)
