With Fur Dead, PETA Crashes NY Fashion Week With New Campaign
For Immediate Release:
February 9, 2021
Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382
One year after PETA marked the end of the fur industry by retiring its “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur” campaign and announcing its plan to focus on all other animal-derived materials, the group is returning to New York Fashion Week—this time virtually and with a nod to Cynthia Nixon’s toxic masculinity–challenging video “Be a Lady They Said.”
PETA (a female-led organization) is releasing “Be a Sweater They Said”—a video that exposes the fashion industry’s attempts to normalize mangling, mutilating, and killing animals for sweaters, bags, and shoes and voices the messages sent to victims: “Make us look good. Make us look rich. Make us look sexy. … You don’t have feelings. You don’t have rights. You don’t have a choice.”
“A sheep isn’t a sweater any more than a woman is a sex object,” says PETA Senior Vice President Lisa Lange, who narrates the video. “PETA’s video challenges the old, false notion that sensitive sheep, cows, and goats are ours to torment and kill at will just because they look different from us.”
PETA and its affiliates have released dozens of videos revealing that workers hit, kick, and mutilate gentle sheep for wool; leave sensitive goats with bloody, gaping wounds at mohair and cashmere operations; burn, electroshock, beat, and slaughter cows for leather; rip out the feathers of ducks and geese by the fistful for down; boil silkworms alive to produce silk; and cause alpacas to spit and vomit in terror from rough shearing.
PETA has also launched an international campaign calling out hypocrisy and the support of animal abuse by Urban Outfitters, Inc., brands—which include Anthropologie, Free People, and Urban Outfitters—and calling on them to stop selling animal-derived items while paying lip service to a progressive and sustainable agenda.
PETA’s motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear.” For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
