Carolina Herrera and Jean Paul Gaultier Ban Exotic Skins

For Immediate Release:
July 6, 2021

Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382

PETA U.K. is celebrating after luxury fashion company Puig—owner of the labels Carolina Herrera, Paco Rabanne, Jean Paul Gaultier, Nina Ricci, and Dries Van Noten—confirmed that it will stop selling items made from the skins of snakes, crocodiles, and other exotic animals. The family-owned Spanish company, which “aims to leave a better world for the next generation,” has assured PETA U.K. that “steps have already been taken to no longer use exotic skins” for its CH Carolina Herrera sub-brand, meaning that the crocodile and python accessories currently available will be its last.

“Given Gaultier’s unconventionality and Herrera’s elegance, they are signaling that no matter your taste in fashion, the skins of exotic animals have no place in fashion today,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “This wise decision marks a major victory for PETA and an even bigger one for the animals who won’t face a violent end.”

PETA and its affiliates have released a number of exposés of the exotic-skins industry revealing rampant cruelty. A recent PETA Asia exposé shows that pythons’ mouths and anuses are closed off with rubber bands and that workers cut a hole in either the snakes’ heads or tails to insert a hose and inflate the animals with an air compressor, causing them to suffocate to death. Alligators are commonly kept in fetid water inside dank, dark sheds until slaughter, when their necks are hacked open and a metal rod is shoved up into their brains, often while they’re still conscious. And year-old ostriches are transported by trucks to slaughterhouses, where workers flip them upside down, stun them, and slit their throats.

The exotic-skins industry also poses a significant public-health risk: Experts warn that these unsanitary and crowded conditions are the perfect breeding grounds for viruses such as the one that caused the COVID-19 pandemic, which is believed to have originated in a live-animal market similar to the farms where exotic skins come from.

Puig’s brands join a growing list of top designers and retailers—including Calvin Klein, Chanel, Victoria Beckham, and Karl Lagerfeld—that have banned the sale of exotic skins.

PETA is calling on other leading fashion brands, such as Louis Vuitton, Hermès, and Prada, to ban exotic skins.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear”—opposes speciesism, the human-supremacist view that animals are nothing more than commodities. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.