Italian designer apologises for selling offending bikinis

Italian clothes designer Roberto Cavalli has apologised to Hindu human rights activists in the UK for selling women's underwear featuring Hindu icons.

The discovery of the bikini tops and bottoms featuring Vishnu, Hanuman and Saraswati unleashed a storm of protest earlier this week from the UK's National Council of Hindu Temples and the UK's Hindu Human Rights group.

Top London shop Harrods which was selling the underwear was forced to apologise and said it would withdraw the product from its shelves.

Now Cavalli himself has apologised for any offence he may have caused.

In a letter sent to the NCH, Emanuela Barbieri, a spokeswoman for Cavalli, said the company admitted that garments produced by Cavalli and stocked by Harrods, may have caused great offence to the Hindu community.

"The fabric produced by Roberto Cavalli was designed to celebrate Hindu culture and not to denigrate it as implied by your recent correspondence."

Now, only days after the London department store was forced to withdraw the new range of women's underwear, another undergarment company has been criticised for their posters.

These feature near naked models on posters close to British mosques. It has been criticised by watchdogs for offending Muslims in Bradford and Leeds.

The offending poster, for Sloggi thongs, features four girls, with their backs to the camera, wearing little more than the thongs and high heels. The caption says 'it's string time.'

This week the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) revealed that it had considered complaints from the cities of Bury, Lancashire, and Harehills, Leeds, as well as from Bradford in Yorkshire, about two Sloggi posters.

The second poster features three rugby union players, Ben Cohen, Simon Taylor and Peter Stringer, facing the camera in white fitted underpants, with a strap-line across reading 'basic power'.

In the Harehills case, the thong poster was on shuttering around the new Bilal Mosque where construction work has been going on for several years.

Last Tuesday it was no longer in place but another one on the same boarding, advertising an internet gambling service, had been painted over.

A spokeswoman for Triumph International said, "We had our posters taken down as soon as we realised they were causing some offence, but the campaign was only due to run for a couple of weeks anyway."