• An interview with designer John Bartlett over at Tim Groen has me pretty inspired and excited! We all know how rare it is to meet other fashion people interested in compassionate lifestyle and cruelty-free design. Bartlett, who is ardently anti-fur and veg, has committed to eliminating all leather from future collections, saying “I decided that I’m not going to work in leather anymore at all.”
• 42,000 gallons of crude oil are spewing out into the Gulf of Mexico very 24 hours. Experts say it could take months to stop the leak that has already covered 600 square miles and threatens wildlife areas and coastlines, like the sensitive Louisiana coastal ecosystem and the Mississippi Delta, now mere miles from the slick. The explosion that caused the oil rig to collapse and killed 11 crew members remains a mystery. BP (Beyond Petroleum), Transocean (the rig’s operational company) and government have not been able to stop the oil from spewing out of a broken pipe 5,000 feet below sea level. And lastly, the blowout-preventer – a device designed to stop a leak in scenarios like this, did not deploy and remains unable to be triggered. Burn the oil. Skim and collect the oil. There is no harmless solution and, in the fashion of an addict that never learns the lesson, the oil economy chugs on. We will all be reassured that “everything is being done” and “no one could have predicted this” and “it’s an unfortunate but unavoidable risk“. Who is doing the reassuring? Well, according to a NYT article yesterday, BP is and their profits more than doubled in the first quarter of last year, thanks to increased oil prices.
How can we ever move on from oil? Will these disasters ever cease and, if not, what does that mean?
Often we hear about how “well managed” and “humane” regulated fur farms are in Europe. People make statements like, “it’s not in our economic interest to mistreat the animals”. Personally, I don’t believe that unhappy animals make bad fur any more than unhappy chickens make bad eggs. What’s worse, fur industry propaganda websites like furisgreen.com claim that the undercover documentation that animals rights activists risk their safety filming is staged in order to reap the millions of dollars in fund-raising profits that animal advocacy organizations “rake in” so that their staffs can lead lives of luxury (as if the fur industry itself weren’t money-driven). I tend to believe the motives of compassion-based non-profit organizations over the motives of for-profit businesses. The EFBA (European Fur Breeders Association) recently released a ridiculous video that is borderline comical. “Openness and transparency are our key words!”, the website yells with an exclamation-point. Goofy rock music plays as we see cute furry baby animals and people relaxing among the rows and rows of cages. At the end, we see images of young teens hugging some animal, and then suddenly, cut to: fur on the runway. Never once do they address how the fur goes from the back of the animal to the back of the runway model. Is killing even involved? Or does the fur magically and joyfully leap off of the animal and onto a runway after each animal gets hugged by kids? Try not to sway to and fro:
Oikeutta Eläimille and Animal Defenders International jointly released a new investigation on Finnish fur farm. The investigators went to 30 different fur farms in the summer and autumn of 2009. They recorded cruel neglect of animals and living conditions with no stimuli where caged animals displayed signs of extreme stress and anxiety. In Finland approximately three million animals are killed annually because of their fur at these farms. Sweden, Denmark, Great Britain, Holland, Switzerland and Croatia have either totally or partially banned fur farming by law.
What about Finland? It’s now time that the largest exporter of fox pelts and one of the largest fur producers in Europe come clean. It’s time to shut down the Finnish fur farming industry. Look at the videos and pictures of the investigation and demand for the ban! Take a look also at Animal Defenders International’s Fur Stop -site.
“I’ve always been anti-fur – I love my pets…and I could never see them being worn. It’s a very human time right now, and what’s the sense in more carnage? There are other things in life to celebrate and design doesn’t have to be draped with dead animals.” - Voctoria Bartlett
I went into Soho posing as a television host to give people wearing fur a hard time. If you want to know why I’m giving these people a hard time, click HERE. Some of my favorite quotes from the fur-wearers:
“…beavers are not extinct, which is one of the reasons that the designers make those furs.” – dude wearing a beaver coat & huge fur hat.
“I’d like to think that they were just run over in the street…” – woman wearing a new full-length mink.
“I just assume it grows its hair back and it’s all OK at the end of the situation…” – woman with fur hat.
“We’re from Michigan, so we need our furs.” -Â mom & daughter fur duo
“I’m an animal lover, so this is quite at odds with being an animal lover.” – woman wearing head-to-toe fur
Yes, it’s that time of year again! When the stores roll out the fur racks and the egos swell into furry puffs of animals’ skins to showcase big wealth, uber-luxury, and so-called ‘high-class’. What are fabulous, anti-fur peeps to do? Duh… Get loud and get organized… and get on it NOW.
celebs in fur promote cruelty
More and more men wear fur
Last year there was almost no anti-fur presence on the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn, and the thousands of Cruella DeVilles too often went unchallenged on the public sidewalks. Obnoxious hipsters are wearing those flappy fur hats by the thousands, and gals are dragging corpses uptown and downtown.
Hipsters wear this
That’s why this year I am putting a call out to get sophisticated, and get started early. We need classy fashionistos and fashionistas to gather materials, strategies, ideas, and events so there is a strong anti-fur presence coming from a place that is intimidating. We want people to know Fur is not welcome in our cities and towns. I’m not talking about picketing…
We need to come at this problem from two places, the web and the street.
WEB:
1. Use social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace to send out your personalized call to action, or to expose the fur industry. This is the one I typically send out (make sure to attach images of animals typically used for fur in their uncaged/untrapped cuteness and then link to a video or image of a fur farm):
Hello Friends!
The seasons to bundle up are quickly approaching. Unfortunately there are many people who try to stay warm in the most horrible way – that’s right, fur season is back.
I can’t imagine that people in the fashion industry continue to use fur. Designers are often bullied into including fur in their collections with threats from magazine editors who are paid off by the fur industry to exclude their lines unless they comply. Many other people simply have no idea how fur garments are made – or don’t want to know.
By ignoring the ways in which the things we purchase and support are made, we silence the cries of those who are tortured. The truth is often too horrible for us to believe, so many of us lie to ourselves. We deny that their cries even exist, because if their cries did exist, they would be impossible to ignore and it would mean we would have to change.
The cries of the fox, chinchilla, or rabbit who are vaginally and anally electrocuted to death – the raccoon who is bludgeoned to death, the mink or chinchilla whose neck is snapped, the beaver whose ribcage is crushed, and whose miserable life is spent caged, malnourished, and unloved in a death-camp, are silenced. The wild Lynx who chews her own arm off to escape, or slowly bleeds to death in a steel trap is no better off.
While a huge amount of fur imported from Asia is in fact dog and cat fur, we wouldn’t be wearing fur if the animal were our own dog or cat. So what’s the difference?
This winter, please speak for the silenced. Let people know that their fur and fur-trim is the product of a tortured, murdered, and silenced animal – and it is anything but sexy, chic, and classy.
Please join fashion icons Stella McCartney, Calvin Klein and Kenneth Cole, supermodel Christy Turlington, Actress Charlize Theron, Pink, Ellen, Martha Stewart, Danity Kane and others on http://furisdead.com/ and http://www.hsus.org/furfree/ to learn more about fur and what you can do to help.
1. Fur Walks: Simple! Gather 4 or 5 of your friends, and get decked out in awesome outfits, and appear as if you’re stylish luminaries on your way to a dinner or an event, and who just so happen to continually come across people in fur, so you just have to say something. No pins, posters, or picket lines! This is stealth-mode! Come up with a few clever/interesting things to start a conversation like, “Where did you get that coat?”.
2. Video / Leaflet / Interview presence: Lets gather our resources on literature, portable video capabilities, and media skills to turn the tables on how people see activism. Everyone wants to be a star, so if we approach people in fur as if we are reporters, asking their opinions and starting conversation that way, it is much easier to give them literature and get through. Plus we can direct them back to our blogs/websites because they’ll love to see themselves! One of my favorite ideas is to use a camera and host method where you make video interviews of people in fur where our stylish/funny host interviews them on camera and starts the dialogue that way.
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What are your ideas?
Get involved, spread the word and plan a meeting/action ASAP!
