Anti-Fur Protesters Storm Paris Fashion Show

For Immediate Release:
6 March 2003

Contact:
Sean Gifford (Paris) +44 (0) 773 457 9092 (mobile)
Dawn Carr (UK) +44 (0) 20 7357 9229, ext. 224

Paris – Two activists were violently ejected from the Christian Dior show this afternoon after one jumped on the runway and disrupted the ‘invitation only’ event, part of Paris’ haute couture fashion week. Attendees gasped when Yvonne Taylor from Scotland took over the runway and unfurled a banner reading, ‘Fur Shame’, and chanted, ‘Fur is Dead.’

The Paris protest comes on the heels of last months’ disruption by PETA activists of Julien Macdonald’s show during London’s fashion week. Things took a very different tack in New York, where PETA sponsored a totally leather and fur-free fashion show by designers Gaelyn and Cianfarani who use recycled rubber bicycle tyres and latex interwoven with cotton and other natural fibres.

PETA is combating increasingly desperate and aggressive marketing campaigns by the fur industry—including giving young designers free furs, free trips to Denmark and sponsoring their fashion shows—to try to boost the lowest sales figures ever. Cosmopolitan magazine reports that more than 90 per cent of British women polled said that they would never wear fur and most young people consider it old fashioned as well as cruel, and wouldn’t be seen dead in the stuff.

‘The only place you see fur nowadays is on catwalks, not sidewalks,’ says Dawn Carr, PETA’s Director. ‘The fur industry is trying every trick in the book to push pelts, but the public aren’t buying it.’

PETA recently stirred up controversy with a shocking anti-fur ad featuring singer Sophie Ellis-Bextor holding a real skinned fox, with the tagline, ‘Here’s the rest of your fur coat’. Although the European Union have banned steel leghold traps because of their cruelty, and fur farms are outlawed in the UK, pelts are imported from countries still using cruel traps, and millions of caged animals are still killed by electrocution on fur farms in Europe alone every year.

For more information, please visit FurIsDead.com.

Broadcast-quality video footage of animals on fur farms is available.