Urban Outfitters’ Animal-Skin Sales Slammed in PETA Ad Blitz

For Immediate Release:
May 17, 2021

Contact:
Brooke Rossi 202-483-7382

Pittsburgh, Pa. –

“I Want You to Change. Wear Vegan.” That’s the message a cow, a goat, an alpaca, and a sheep have for would-be Urban Outfitters shoppers, courtesy of new PETA ads that just went up on bus shelters and kiosks across the city.

Pittsburgh is consistently ranked as a top city for millennials—a major market for Urban Outfitters, Inc. brands (which include Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, and Free People, with five stores in the city) and one PETA hopes to reach as pandemic restrictions ease and shoppers seek out back-to-“real life” wardrobes.

“Urban Outfitters wants to appeal to progressive young people, but it’s missing the mark by selling bags and shoes made with bits of animals’ stolen skin, fleece, and feathers,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA is encouraging kind shoppers to refresh their closets with vegan styles that leave animals in peace.”

The ads are part of PETA’s international campaign demanding that all Urban Outfitters, Inc. brands stop selling leather, cashmere, alpaca, wool, and anything else cruelly obtained from animals.

PETA originally tried to place ads showing insider photos from the fashion industry, in which workers hit, kick, and mutilate gentle sheep for their wool; leave sensitive goats with bloody, gaping wounds at cashmere operations; burn, electroshock, beat, and slaughter cows for leather; and abuse animals in other ways. The images included a still from a PETA investigation into one of Anthropologie’s own alpaca suppliers, which revealed that alpacas spit and vomited in fear from rough shearing—but the city of Pittsburgh refused to place the ads. “We cannot display an animal under duress or being mistreated,” an ad rep explained.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

PETA’s ads are on bus shelters and kiosks at the following locations:

1615 Penn Ave.
3300 Liberty Ave.
4131 Liberty Ave.
100 12^th
6508 Frankstown Ave.
6904 Frankstown Ave.
5880 Centre Ave. (both sides)
5299 Centre Ave.