Breaking: ‘Skinned’ PETA Model Crashes The Fashion Awards Red Carpet
London – Earlier this evening, a PETA supporter stepped onto the red carpet at The Fashion Awards at the Royal Albert Hall to reveal realistic “flesh”, “tendons”, and “muscle” painted on her nude body, along with the words “Turn Your Back on Leather” across her back. She held a sign that read, “Leather Kills”.
Video footage of the red-carpet takeover is available here, and photos are available here.
“Any designer still using the skin of tormented cows and calves in their collections is living in the past,” says PETA Senior Campaigns Manager Kate Werner. “PETA is calling on the fashion world to turn its back on animal leather and embrace the innovative vegan materials that are already available today.”
When cows used for leather are sent to slaughterhouses, workers may cut their throats and dismember and skin them while they’re still conscious, often after they’ve endured castration, tail docking, and dehorning – without any painkillers – on farms. Much of the leather used for “luxury” fashion comes from baby calves who were taken from their mothers within hours of birth and may have endured extreme confinement in the veal industry overseas. Exposés by PETA entities of the world’s largest leather processor showed that workers brand calves on the face, beat cows and bulls, and shock them with electric prods.
Turning animals’ skin into leather requires 130 different chemicals – including cyanide – and animal agriculture, which includes the leather industry, is one of the leading contributors to the climate catastrophe. Cow leather has been ranked the most polluting textile in fashion by several industry reports, whereas sustainable vegan leather can be made from prickly pear cacti, mushrooms, apple skins, pineapples, and other innovative materials. PETA notes that leather is not a byproduct but a co-product of the meat and dairy industries that’s worth billions of dollars. Many species, whose skin fetches a higher price than their flesh, are raised either solely for their skin or for meat and leather.
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 X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram.
Contact:
Lucy Watson +44 (0) 20 7837 6327; [email protected]
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