Zara, as a major international corporation headquartered in the European Union, certainly requested permission from Disney before producing the t-shirt visible here. The actual design of the shirt was likely done by one of Zara’s 200 staff artists working at their production facilities in La Coruña, Spain. Working on the tight production schedule demanded by a fast fashion chain like Zara, the artist likely iterated through many designs in a matter of days.

Once the chosen design was settled on, it was forwarded to a manufacturing facility in northern Portugal, a region with some of the lowest labor costs in Western Europe. Though manufacturing there is slightly more expensive than in Asia, its proximity to Zara’s main stores in Western Europe allows the entire sales and production process—from the first design, frequently lifted from high fashion runways, through being discontinued—to be compressed into a matter of weeks. Thus, after being manufactured in Portugal, Mickey traveled via a ship on the Mediterranean and across the Arabian peninsula to reach the Zara store in the Abu Dhabi Mall, one of 1,671 Zara stores worldwide.