Urban Outfitters to Face Raucous PETA Protest

New Global Campaign Points Out That Alpaca, Wool, Leather, Mohair, Cashmere, Down, and Silk Belong to Their Original Owners

For Immediate Release:
December 11, 2020

Contact:
Brooke Rossi 202-483-7382

Tomorrow, at the peak of the busy holiday shopping season, PETA supporters in animal masks will surround an Urban Outfitters’ store in SoHo as part of the group’s new international campaign demanding that all Urban Outfitters, Inc., brands—which include Anthropologie, Free People, and Urban Outfitters—stop selling alpaca fleece and anything else cruelly obtained from animals. The protesters will hold signs showing the terrified faces of exploited animals and others reading, “The Face of Fashion Is Fear.”

When:    Saturday, December 12, 12 noon

Where:    Urban Outfitters, 628 Broadway, New York

PETA launched the campaign after Anthropologie was implicated in a first-of-its-kind PETA investigation into the alpaca industry revealing that workers at a farm in Peru tied crying alpacas to a rack, pulling their legs so hard that they nearly came out of their sockets, and left them with bloody wounds from rough shearing. The mutilated animals spit and vomited in fear.

“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. “Anything forcibly taken from an animal is a product of fear, and PETA is holding Urban Outfitters to its consumer pledge of sustainability and ethics by calling on the company to sell only vegan materials, which would be easy for it to do because it already stocks them.”

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 has also held protests at Urban Outfitters stores in Austin, Texas; Kansas City, Missouri; San Diego, and elsewhere, during which protesters stormed the stores and took over the front window displays.

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.