How Animal-Free Fashion Is Becoming The Norm
Advances in animal-free fashion, featuring alternatives to feathers, fur, leather, wool and silk, are gradually sending animal-based materials into the dustbin of history.
Los Angeles, February 22nd, 2024 — It’s the dream of every vegan, to wake up one day and discover that humans have stopped wearing fur, leather, wool, silk and feathers. It’s hard to identify sweeping cultural changes in real time, but there’s growing evidence that this dream is gradually becoming a reality. As fashion styles evolve and animal-free materials become more sophisticated, trendsetters are gravitating towards vegan leathers and going full-on faux when it comes to everything from fur to feathers.
Among the leaders of this fashion revolution are Monica Kay, a burlesque dancer and founder of Feather Phase Out, Vikki Lenola, a model who produces The Vegan Fashion Show in Canada, and Nina Jackel, aka Lady Freethinker, the famous activist who exposes the horrors of real fur through undercover investigations. These three women spoke to UnchainedTV’s Jane Velez-Mitchell about their respective campaigns to get the cruelty out of fashion forever.
Watch: Cruelty, Get The Hell Out Of Fashion!
Feathers Are For the Birds!
Monica Kay is a Los Angeles-based burlesque performer, choreographer and fitness coach. When she’s not teaching pole dancing classes, she’s making faux feather burlesque fans and raising awareness about the suffering of birds used in entertainment and fashion. She’s launched a feather boycott campaign called Feather Phase Out. The goal is to end the use of bird feathers in entertainment by 2025, with the focus primarily on burlesque, which often features costumes dripping in feathers. Kay explains why she started fighting for the forgotten birds of the fashion industry:
“I started the Feather Phase Out campaign in January of 2023. As a dancer, and as a vegan, I’m very aware of how feathers are used in all forms of dance, and it was always upsetting to me to be in dressing rooms, or even be an audience member at a show, and see feathers.”
Burlesque costumes often include feathers on headdresses, gloves, boas, robes, and dance fans, and many entertainers and consumers mistakenly believe that it’s all cruelty-free, that the birds shed these feathers through the molting process. Feather Phase Out is on a mission to wake people up to the truth about feathers and cruelty. These feathers are either routinely torn from the animal or taken from an animal who has been slaughtered.
Feather Phase Out also offers a free tutorial on how to create faux feather burlesque fans using faux pampas and bamboo staves.
“I think that there’s a need for faux feathers in burlesque because the demand is there. People want to use them.” — Monica Kay, Feathers Phase Out
Animal-Free Fashion Shows
Model and animal rights activist Vikki Lenola is the producer and director of The Vegan Fashion Show in Canada. The most recent show, which happened in December of 2023 in Toronto, was a gender-fluid extravaganza featuring the work of designers on the cutting edge of fashion. Lenola started this project because of the challenges she faced being both a vegan and a professional model. She explains:
“I started doing this because of activism that I was doing. Doing friendly outreach, I realized people were like, ‘Well, aren’t you wearing leather shoes?’ And it’s so easy to think, ‘Oh, what a ridiculous question,’ but people really don’t know. They don’t know that cheap old-school vegan leather exists, let alone Next Gen materials.”
Her events showcase the latest animal-free materials which also eschew plastic for environment reasons. One of her main goals is to educate the fashion industry about the growing number of alternatives that are both vegan and sustainable, like vegan leathers made from cork, mushrooms and pineapples. She also reminds the industry about all the cruelty that every single animal product requires.
“I think a lot of the people in the Toronto area, and I’m sure everywhere else, don’t really know what’s going on, how these animals become ‘materials’ for the fur industry and leather. What we do is, even for our model casting, we’ll have a presentation about it. We preview trailers for different documentaries.”
“We had an indigenous designer, which is great because a lot of people in Canada think that indigenous and vegan are conflicting, but it doesn’t have to be that way.” — Vikki Lenola, The Vegan Fashion Show Canada
Exposing the Fur Industry
Nina Jackel is a journalist and activist known as Lady Freethinker, which is also the name of her animal rights nonprofit. Jackel’s organization exposes cruel and illegal activities through undercover operations. She also mobilizes thousands of ordinary citizens through her very effective petition drives, often aimed at government and law enforcement. On February 5th, 2024, Lady Freethinker announced their latest investigation. She explains what was this one about:
“We found thousands of foxes and raccoon dogs just languishing in tiny, filthy cages on two Chinese fur farms. This was an investigation in cooperation with PAWS of China. These animals were removed from their breeding housing cages using metal tongs or poles. They’re crammed into these tiny cages and shipped off to slaughter. Some of them were actually slaughtered on site. Very often, they were seen moving, thrashing around, blinking and still visibly conscious, even as they were being skinned.”
Investigators found these tormented animals on four fur farms in Hebei and Jilin, China. While China is the world’s biggest producer of animal fur, it’s exported worldwide, including to the United States. Lady Freethinker has launched a petition urging retailers to stop selling fur. Sales of new fur products are already illegal in California.
Thanks to years of relentless campaigning by PETA, a slew of major designers have stopped using fur and many celebrities have declared fur a fashion faux pas. Unfortunately, says Jackel, the forces of greed are always maneuvering to bring it back.
“There’s a pendulum, and it tends to swing. We are seeing that ‘mob-wife fur trend’ happening, unfortunately, which has made things more difficult. That said, I do believe that the momentum is still there, and as long as we keep talking about it, as long as we keep showing people the reality behind it, and offering those amazing vegan fashions, I do believe that, not only is it winnable, but we will win this soon.”
“I do hope that, with these findings, we can expose the reality of this industry to more people and help them make more compassionate decisions because nobody needs to wear fur.” — Nina Jackel, Lady Freethinker
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