Copenhagen fashion week has just announced that it will ban exotic skins and feathers from its catwalks next year, becoming the biggest industry event yet to do so.to Copenhagen fashion week for raising the bar for other events,” says the vice-president of corporate projects at People for the Ethical Treatment of, Yvonne Taylor. “Now all eyes are on other fashion week organisers, who must follow suit.
The catwalks of New York, London, Paris and Milan were only last month home to an aviary’s worth of feathers. They were abundant on the red carpets this awards season, too. But Emma Håkansson, the founding director of Collective Fashion Justice, says that while the industry has by and large “decided it’s unacceptable to kill an animal specifically for fashion”, she thinks it is yet to conceive of the cruelty involved in the feather supply chains, which most commonly involve ostriches, in the same way.
Part of the issue is “the way that fashion separates the animal from the final product”, says Håkansson, whose organisation consulted with Copenhagen fashion week alongside World Animal Protection to persuade them to enact this policy. While researching feathers recently, she showed people a photo of a dress that had trimming made from ostrich feathers. The vast majority didn’t identify them correctly. The same is also true for brands.
Håkansson agrees that there’s an emotional barrier: “It’s really difficult for people to connect with the reality that a crocodile or a snake is absolutely sentient in the same way that a fox or a mink is,” she says. Håkansson also believes that there has been a push by the industry to say that these materials, such as fur and leather, are natural as opposed to fossil fuel-derived synthetic materials. But, she points out, they are no longer biodegradable once they have been processed.