Fashion Animals exposes

FASHION INDUSTRY'S Fashion Animals exposes FATAL ATTRACTION TO ANIMALS BY NICOLE RIVARD

During the May public hearing for Intro 1476, the fur sales ban legislation introduced in NYC, fashion designer, author, activist and educator Joshua Katcher said: “The beauty of a garment should be matched by the beauty of how it was made. This is why fur is the epitome of bad design.”

Put that way, I thought, bad design is fashion suicide, so it’s just a matter of time before no one is using or buying fur. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that and the reasons are laid out in Katcher’s new book, Fashion Animals. Designers and consumers refuse to denounce fur or to stop wearing other animals because it is such a heavily guarded and defended “tradition.” One would assume people attracted to fur as a status symbol would reject a mink coat once they learned the confined animals are riddled with injuries, covered in sores and live in their own feces because their cages often go uncleaned for weeks. Fur farms are as far from luxury and prestige as one can get.

But instead of driving yourself crazy trying to make sense of why sentient beings are still exploited for fashion, pick up Katcher's exposé of D

the industry’s fatal attraction to the animal kingdom. He goes where no one has gone before to show the point of view of the fashion animals, who once valued their own lives, who did not go willingly. I won’t soon forget what happens to snakes and alligators so well-heeled humans can wear them.

Even Katcher was shocked by what he unearthed. For instance, the fashion industry is partially responsible for the koala bear’s near-extinction. In the 1920s, koala skins were being intentionally mislabeled and sold as wombat in American and English markets to cover up the selling of protected animals. He was also surprised by how many species have been driven to extinction/near-extinction for the sake of status symbols and fashion trends. One example is the huia, a bird native to New Zealand. It became a fashion rage after an image of the Duke of Cornwall with a huia feather in his cap circulated in the London newspapers.

Katcher is optimistic because of emerging material innovation. “Wearing animals' body parts will soon only represent the wearers’ denial of animal sentience, and therefore the denial of modern science, a hatred of animals or a crass financial privilege,” he writes.

And no one can wear that message well.

This is a must-read for fashion students so they understand that animals’ lives should never be taken for the sake of our apparel, no matter what the likes of what Vogue editor Anna Wintour says.

While today you’d rarely glimpse an article in Vogue critical of the treatment of non-human animals for fashion, founding editor Jose

phine Redding started a column in the magazine called, “Concerning Animals” back in 1900. It called out lovers of fur and feather fashions, whose support of those industries were threatening a surge of animal extinctions at the time.

One thing we know about fashion is its cyclical—so we can only hope the revival of Redding’s attitude is on the horizon. Because billions of animals lives depend on it.