Helsinki Fashion Week Signs PETA’s Feather-Free Pledge
Update (10 December 2024):
After exposés by PETA entities revealing that birds exploited by the feather industry endure a miserable life and a violent death, Helsinki Fashion Week and VLGE.COM founder Evelyn Mora has signed PETA’s Feather-Free Pledge and promised never to showcase feathers on her platforms. This step follows the founder’s ground-breaking decision to make the sustainability-focused platform leather-free in 2018.
“In 2024, the vast array of innovative and sustainable solutions in the market leaves no justification for supporting outdated, unethical practices in fashion. I challenge consumers to live by their values. Our purchasing choices carry profound interdisciplinary impacts—environmental, social, and economic. Ironically, the most self-serving decision we can make is to support sustainable brands, invest in thoughtfully crafted products, and adopt a long-term perspective in how we approach fashion and lifestyle.”
– Evelyn Mora, Helsinki Fashion Week and VLGE.COM founder
As Helsinki Fashion Week forges ahead, Milan and Paris Fashion Weeks remain stuck in the dark ages, showcasing fur and wild-animal skins on their catwalks. Ask them to change:
Original blog (13 August 2018): Helsinki Fashion Week Goes Leather-Free After PETA Appeal
After receiving a letter from PETA, the sustainability-focused Helsinki Fashion Week has pledged to prohibit leather, starting with its July 2019 events.
We at Helsinki Fashion Week, with the support of the Nordic Fashion Week Association, are taking an active stand against cruelty to animals and the damaging environmental impacts that the use of animal leather brings with it.
By banning leather, Helsinki Fashion Week will become a groundbreaking, cutting-edge presence on the fashion scene. We look forward to seeing animal and eco-friendly vegan fabrics take over Helsinki catwalks in 2019 and beyond.
The leather industry subjects more than 1 billion animals every year to intensive confinement, castration without pain relief, extreme crowding, and a terrifying trip to the abattoir. Leather is a lucrative co-product of the meat industry, which is one of the world’s biggest polluters and contributors to climate change. And tanneries – which use formaldehyde, coal-tar derivatives, cyanide-based dyes, and other dangerous chemicals – are notorious for polluting nearby water and soil.
For these reasons and others, vegan leather – made from pineapple leaves, grapes, mushrooms, cork, and more – is on the rise. Top designers including Stella McCartney, Vika Gazinskaya, and Felder Felder all refuse to use animal leather in their designs, and two-thirds of millennials reportedly would pay more for sustainably made items.
