Breaking: PETA Supporters Crash Hermès Event in London

London – Earlier this evening, PETA supporters descended on the Sarabande Foundation in London to disrupt an event at which Hermès Artistic Director Nadège Vanhée-Cybulski was speaking and expose the luxury brand’s refusal to stop using exotic skins. See video footage of the disruption here. The footage is available to download here.

The confrontation is the latest action in PETA’s campaign urging Hermès to do right by animals. In September, a PETA “model” took over the Hermès runway during Paris Fashion Week, brandishing a sign reading, “Hermès: Drop Exotic Skins”.

“Crocodiles are bludgeoned, gutted, and skinned alive to be turned into bags, belts, and other accessories,” says PETA UK, Europe, and Australia Vice President Mimi Bekhechi. “PETA disrupted this event to urge Hermès to drop these cruelly obtained materials and to remind everyone that animals are not ours to wear.”

PETA US became a Hermès shareholder in 2015 after exposing cruelty on reptile farms in Texas and Zimbabwe that supplied a Hermès-owned tannery. In 2017, an exposé in Vietnam showed that crocodiles were confined to grim concrete stalls with unsanitary pools and subjected to violent deaths. Footage showed that workers cut into the animals’ spines while they were still alive and peeled off their skin.

In addition, a recent investigation by Kindness Project into Australian farms owned by Hermès documented that crocodiles were kept in cramped, barren enclosures and then mutilated and stabbed with a screwdriver.

PETA notes that it takes two or three crocodiles to make just one Hermès bag and that many designers – including Burberry, Victoria Beckham, Karl Lagerfeld and Chanel – have dropped exotic skins from their collections.

PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow the group on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, or Instagram.

Contact:

Lucy Watson +44 (0) 20 7837 6327; [email protected]

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