Why are animals so often left out of the conversation about sustainable and ethical fashion? We talk about people and planet, but less often about our fellow living creatures. This week's guest Emma Hakansson wants to change that. She challenges us to rethink the idea of animals as commodities - they are, she says, someone, not something.

Emma is the founder of Collective Fashion Justice, an organisation that puts animals as well as people and planet at the heart of an ethical fashion industry. A self-described “activist, passionate about anti-speciesism, autonomy and collective liberation,” Emma is also an author, her books include How Veganism Can Save Us (Survive the Modern World) and she was one of the producers of, and also appears in the documentary, Slay.

In this interview, we zero in on leather. “By the time it has been turned into a bag, a pair of shoes, a belt or a jacket, we tend to forget it, leather is skin,” says Emma. “Thanks to long supply chains, the power of the global leather industry and big luxury brands, plus the pretty language used to market fancy handbag materials, most of us never think about how leather is produced. As with supermarket meat and dairy products, we’ve totally disassociated from its origins." Emma believes cruelty should never be in style. She’d like us to check our morals, and ask ourselves how comfortable we really are treating animals as a commodity.

Whatever your view on that, the way that most leather is produced in such high volumes today is an environmental nightmare, she says, while its supply chains conceal as much social injustice as cut-and-sew does for the garment industry - it just gets less attention.

NOTES

WHAT IS VEGANISM? On the podcast, Emma reads out this definition, quoted in her book. It’s from 1944, by the Vegan Society, which was founded in that year: “[Veganism is] a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude – as far as is possible and practicable – all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans, animals and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.’

CAMBRIDGE DECLARATION ON CONSCIOUSNESS On July 7, 2012, a prominent international group of cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomists and computational neuroscientists gathered at The University of Cambridge to reassess the neurobiological substrates of conscious experience and related behaviors in human and non-human animals.More here.

SPECIEISM is the human-held belief that all other animal species are inferior.

FASHION CONNECTION some of the ways the fashion industry uses animals include skins like leather, suede, shearling and fur but also shorn hair products that do not require killing in order to obtain them, for example, wool, cashmere and mohair. As Emma points out, silk is not vegan either - being derived from the cocoon of a worm (although a small portion of silk is cruelty-free/ can be marketed as vegan if it’s eri silk: during it’s processing the moth is allowed to fly away as it would naturally before its cocoon is unravelled. Conventional silk involves boiling or baking the moths in their cocoons).

SLAY is a 2022 documentary by Rebecca Cappelli following her “journey around the world to uncover the dark side of the fashion industry. Rebecca's investigation into the animal skins trade unravels a harrowing story of greenwashing, mislabeling, animal cruelty and cover-ups from some of the world's major luxury fashion brands. SLAY provides an in-depth and eye-opening look into the realities of today’s fashion industry while pointing the way towards viable and sustainable alternatives.Are you ready to get under fashion’s skin?” Watch it here.

FUR As Clare mentions, the global fur industry has about halved in recent years. Says Business of Fashion: “Over the last few years, brands including Gucci, Prada and Burberry all promised to stop using fur. The market's value was estimated at $22 billion in 2019, down a whopping 45 percent from $40 billion in 2015, according to the International Fur Federation (IFF), a trade group.” For more detailed stats, see Humane Society.

In Denmark, the world's largest producer of mink, all farmed mink were culled in 2020 to limit the spread of COVID-19 after a series of outbreaks.

However, that doesn’t mean no one’s wearing fur. Apart from markets where the sale of full furs continue to grow (like China, American rap stars, Rihanna is also still at it apparently), the use of fur trims continues apace.

On the CFJ website, Emma writes: “Certainly, most people don’t tend to drape foxes around their necks anymore. But a parka with a far less identifiable ‘animal’ trim made of a a coyote’s fur is commonplace. A fluffy white fur bobble on a key ring or a beanie can be bought cheaply.”

And while someone like Donatella can say she doesn’t want to kill animals for fashion when she swears off using fur for Versace, argues CFJ, there’s a sort of cognitive dissonance going on where leather doesn’t count…

“The myth of leather as a mere by-product perpetuates the acceptability of wearing bovine skins,” writes Emma and co-authors Carly Halliday, Danielle May and Natalie LaBarber in Under the Skin.  CFJ’s 2023 report, together with Four Paws, on the leather’s impact on animals. “Though by the time it has been turned into a bag, a pair of shoes, a belt or a jacket we tend to forget it, leather is skin.

“Brands like Versace – and almost all others across the luxury and mainstream fashion industry – are of course both funding and profiting from the killing of animals, regardless of whether or not the slaughtered animal skins these brands use are from animal carcasses which are also butchered for meat sales.” More here.

LEATHER

According to the report: “The complexity of global leather supply chains makes it difficult to trace environmental, human and non-human animal abuse and exploitation. Not only does the changing location between cattle farms, slaughterhouses and tanneries make this leather tracing challenging, but so too does the reality of multiple farms and ranches being involved in leather supply chains, due to the use of 'birthing farms', 'backgrounder farms', 'direct farms' and feedlots.”

WHAT ABOUT idea that it’s a byproduct of the meat industry. That it would go to waste if we didn’t use the skins? Nope, insists CFJ. “Leather is often referred to as a ‘by-product’ and made out to be financially insignificant by the industry which profits from this narrative. This argument is used to claim that buying leather is not really supporting animal slaughter or environmental harm, but rather reducing waste. This is not accurate.

Animal skins are worth a vast sum to the meat and dairy industries. The global leather goods market was valued at $394 billion USD in 2020, with growth expected unless major change is made. “ Read the rest here.

Clare mentions that Americans alone eat 50 bn burgers a year…

ABATTOIR & TANNERY WORKERS In How Veganism Can Save Us, there’s a chapter called “Veganism Can Help Humans Directly”, where Emma make another link we don’t tend to hear too much about, presumably another thing we’d prefer to look away from: Intensive farming and the story of globalization and exploitation in animal ag is racist too.

She writes: “No one wants to work in a slaughterhouse. No one dreams of killing for a living when they grow up. If we think about this for a moment, it’s perhaps not surprising that vulnerable, marginalised individuals are made to do this dirty work for the rest of us. The British Meat Industry states that upwards of 62 per cent of slaughterhouse workers in the United Kingdom are migrants. In the US, a large portion of these workers are also migrants, refugees and oppressed Black, Indigenous and people of colour. Often undocumented, these workers are less able to stand up for themselves for fear of deportation.”

… Perhaps the reason workers are so often mistreated in this industry is because animal bodies and lives are not valued in it, making way for and normalising a lack of value for any life – including those of humans.”