“The presence of animal skins on our pages and in our digital media is no longer in line with our values, nor with those of our readers,” he said. Valeria Bessolo Llopiz, vice president and international director of the publication, owned by the French group Lagardère.
“It’s time for Elle to make a statement … rejecting cruelty to animals” and “raising awareness” to “foster a more humane fashion industry,” she announced during a conference organized by online magazine The Business. of Fashion in Chipping Norton, central England.
From Mexico to Australia, via Japan or the United States, the 45 editions of this publication with three quarters of a century of history, which claims 33 million readers and one hundred million visitors per month on its 55 digital platforms, signed an act committing to exclude animal skins.
In 13 of them it is already effective, 20 will apply it from next January 1 and the rest at the beginning of 2023.
Celebrating the decision, PJ Smith, responsible for fashion of the NGO Human Society InternationalHe said he hopes “other fashion magazines will follow suit.”
“This announcement will spark positive change throughout the fashion industry and has the potential to save countless animals from a life of suffering and cruel death,” Smith said at the Chipping Norton event.
“The promotion of furs belongs to the old copies of the fashion magazines of yesteryear,” PETA UK director Elisa Allen told AFP before the announcement.
This animal advocacy organization “applauds today’s leading publications – including British Vogue, InStyle USA, Cosmopolitan UK and the newly launched Vogue Scandinavia– for rejecting skins on their editorial pages, and we have no doubt that they will soon extend this policy to cover their advertising as well, “he added.
In recent years, under pressure from animalists, the fashion world has started to move away from natural fur.
They have been banned by minor catwalks such as Amsterdam, Oslo, Melbourne or Helsinki, which also ruled out leather. But not the big ones, like Paris, Milan and New York, which leave the decision to each brand.
These are, however, more and more numerous: the Italians Gucci, Versace and Prada, the british Burberry, Vivienne Westwood y Alexander McQueen, the americans Donna Karan, DKNY and Michael Kors and the french Jean-Paul Gaultier and Balenciaga, among others, have joined the campaign.
The commitment goes hand in hand with public opinion: in 2020 a YouGov poll showed that 93% of Britons refuse to wear natural fur and another from Research Co that 71% of Americans are opposed to killing animals for them.
In Europe, 90% of French people are against the fur trade according to an IFOP poll this year, 86.3% of Italians declared themselves against their production in a Eurispes survey in 2019 and 84% of Germans considered the breeding and slaughter unjustifiable of animals for their skins according to Kantar in 2020.
In June, Israel became the first country in the world to ban its sale to the fashion industry.
For its part, the fur industry denounces the replacement of this natural product by synthetic hides made of plastic materials that are harmful to the environment.
Thus, in November the French furriers’ association wrote an open letter to Vogue magazine denouncing as “absurd” that “they present garments made of plastic as’ eco-friendly ‘because they are made from’ carefully selected materials of acrylic leathers’ “.
This group also denounces that the decisions of creators and consumers respond to a “climate of terror” caused by “violence and harassment” of activists in the streets and catwalks.
If many artificial skins are made of polyester, which takes hundreds of years to degrade, creators such as the British Stella McCartney advocate materials made from plants, while others resort to optical games with lace, tube-stitched feathers and wool combinations to imitate animal hair using natural fibers.
Source From: Ambito
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