PETA storms the Coach fashion show to denounce the use of leather

While the French government measures the length of girls’ skirts to see if they are short enough for them to study, the Fashion Week is in full swing in New York. During Coach’s spring-summer 2024 fashion show, presented on September 7, 2023 in the capital (and which marked 10 years of Stuart Vevers at the helm of the artistic direction of the American trunk manufacturer), PETA protesters broke into the podium.

“Leather kills” claims PETA who infiltrated a Coach fashion show

In a press release, the animal rights group PETA claims its action as follows:

“A PETA supporter – naked except for body paint depicting realistic flesh, tendons and muscles, and a message on her chest proclaiming ‘Coach: Leather Kills’ – stormed the Coach fashion show in New York – “flesh”, realistic “tendons” and “muscles” and a message on the chest reading “Coach: Leather Kills” – took the Coach show in New York by storm.

[…] “Today’s conscientious consumers know that the future of fashion lies in innovative vegan materials, not sliced ​​cowhide,” says Tracy Reiman, executive vice president of PETA. “PETA rocks the Coach runway to send the message that leather belongs in the annals of history, not in the collections of current designers.”

In slaughterhouses, cows killed for their skin can be skinned and dismembered while still conscious, after having undergone castration, tail docking and dehorning on farms, without painkillers. A PETA investigation into the world’s largest leather manufacturer – which supplied Coach – found that workers branded calves in the face, beat cows and bulls and hit them with electric cattle prods.

PETA – whose motto says, in part, that “animals don’t belong to us” – opposes speciesism, a human supremacist worldview. »

PETA’s second activist entertains the fashion world

Behind the activist Body paintingthere was one of her sisters, in a matching blush pink draped top, holding a sign proclaiming the same thing: “ Coach: Skin kills “. And while the purpose of the message was to raise awareness among the fashion public about the excesses of the leather industry, many fashionistas are amused by the fact that the second activist walked like an excellent model. Perhaps she was part of the real cast of the pageant, which could have allowed her to help her colleague infiltrate it, no one knows yet. The fact remains that she showed so well that the show continued as if nothing had happened, and a part of fashion Twitter was enthusiastic about the his approach:

Alternatives to leather, often less eco-responsible than they seem

Others prefer to question the relevance of this criticism to conventional leather, being in the vast majority of cases a co-product (therefore a sort of waste) of the meat industry. Currently, most alternatives presented as plant-based to animal leather (such as fake apple, grape or even pineapple leather) are actually made mostly of plastic, as we deciphered in the “Leather” episode. of the podcast Raw material. But other innovations are starting to get noticed, such as Dessert based on cacti and vegetable biopolymers, or even Mylo which is 100% mushroom. Except that these innovations often have a high price, hence the fact that we find them mostly in the luxury and premium sectors, while it is the rather poor quality imitation leather (often 100% plastic) that reigns in the luxury and premium sectors . Marche.

Since there is no silver bullet that fits all budgets, the best thing is to make the animal skin items you already own last as long as possible, and find out what the imitation leather items we are considering are actually made of. buy (because “ vegan leather » means nothing, for example, and that what constitutes fake leather made from grapes, apples or pineapples is often more than 50% plastic, so mixed with biomass as to make it together almost impossible to recycle, as explained in the episode of Raw material on the skins, once again). In short, leather kills, but so does plastic, so we might as well limit them as much as possible.

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