Australian Fashion Week Bans Wild-Animal Skins, Furs and Wild Feathers
Effective immediately, Sydney’s big annual fashion industry event will ban furs, wild-animal skins, and wild feathers from its catwalk. Crocodiles, foxes, and wild birds will no longer suffer so their skins and feathers can be displayed at Australian Fashion Week.
The Australian Fashion Council’s new policy was developed alongside Collective Fashion Justice and World Animal Protection, and comes following years of activism calling for cruel materials to be excluded from the show.
PETA has been among those urging the Australian Fashion Council to ban all animal products from its show. In 2015, body-painted demonstrators descended on Sydney’s Carriageworks calling for an end of fur in fashion.
In 2021, we made a splash by dumping buckets of black “toxic slime” over our heads outside the event, representing the harmful waste generated by the leather industry. And in 2022, we countered narratives about wool by greeting fashion show attendees with eye-catching stencils exposing the cruel wool industry.
Animals Killed for Fashion
Every year, more than 1 billion animals are slaughtered in the global leather industry. Sheep raised for wool are routinely mutilated, abused, and eventually killed. Foxes, minks, and chinchillas spend their entire lives confined to cramped, filthy wire cages just to be slaughtered for their fur. The wild-skins industry claims the lives of millions of snakes, alligators, seals, zebras, and other animals.
Since more and more designers are embracing vegan fashion, making compassionate choices is fun and easy.
PETA entities have released dozens of investigations exposing cruelty to animals exploited for clothing. Videos have revealed that workers bludgeon rabbits and electrocute chinchillas for their fur, slaughter year-old ostriches, and hack at crocodiles’ necks and shove metal rods down their spines in a crude attempt to kill them for their skin.
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