Nordstrom Bans Fur; PETA Sets Its Sights on Urban Outfitters

Fresh Off a Victory in Nordstrom Campaign, an ‘Alpaca’ Helps Group Kick Off New International Campaign Against Urban Outfitters Brands

For Immediate Release:
September 29, 2020

Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382

After Anthropologie was implicated in a first-of-its-kind PETA investigation—in which workers left crying alpacas with bloody wounds from rough shearing—activists and an “alpaca” blocked the entrance to the brand’s Philadelphia store today to demand that it stop selling alpaca fleece and anything else cruelly obtained from animals. PETA supporters worldwide will hold similar protests this week.

The new campaign follows PETA’s victorious Nordstrom campaign, which started calling on the company to ban fur since at least 1999. After 15 years of meetings with the group and a Nordstrom-targeted PETA exposé of the Russian fur industry, Nordstrom announced today that it will no longer sell fur or exotic skins.

“Urban Outfitters brands want to appeal to open-minded and progressive young people, but they’re missing the mark by selling fleece taken from animals who get beat up, cut up, and killed in the process,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA worked for over two decades to push Nordstrom to go fur-free, and we’ll work just as tirelessly to push Urban Outfitters to sell only the stylish and sustainable vegan materials it already stocks.”

PETA’s investigation took place at the world’s largest privately owned alpaca farm in Peru, which is owned by the Michell Group, a supplier of major brands, including Anthropologie. The disturbing footage shows that during shearing, workers hit, kicked, tied down, and mutilated screaming alpacas, who spit and vomited in fear.

The group is also urging all Urban Outfitters Inc. brands—including Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, and Free People—to drop wool, leather, cashmere, mohair, down, and silk, as each one is a product of extreme violence, cruelty, and fear. PETA and its affiliates have released dozens of videos revealing that during shearing, workers hit, kick, and mutilate gentle sheep for their wool; leave sensitive goats with bloody, gaping wounds at mohair and cashmere operations; burn, electroshock, beat, and slaughter cows for leather; yank out the feathers of ducks and geese by the fistful for down; and boil silkworms alive to produce silk.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear”—opposes speciesism, the human-supremacist worldview that animals are nothing more than commodities. For more information, please visit PETA.org.