Three big fur fashion announcements build on one long-ago campaign discovery
NEW YORK, N.Y.––“What would it take to rid fashion of animal fur?” mused longtime sustainable fashion consultant Lucianne Tonti for the fashion magazine Vogue on December 11, 2025.
“In the space of a couple of weeks in early December 2025,” Tonti recounted, “animal rights activists celebrated three big announcements.
“The first was when Poland — the world’s second largest producer of animal fur behind China — passed a law that proposes to end fur farming by 2033.
“Then, the Council of Fashion Designers of America announced animal fur will be prohibited at New York Fashion Week from September 2026.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
Hearst & Condé-Nast
Finally, Tonti wrote, “Hearst Magazines, publisher of Elle, Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar and Esquire among others, announced a ban on fur in its editorial and advertising content. Vogue Business publisher Condé Nast made a similar move in October.”
Business of Fashion writer Jessica Kwon two days earlier reported that Hearst Magazines “has added a new regulation to the sustainability section of its ‘About Us’ web page:
“Across our portfolio of wholly owned global brands, Hearst Magazines prohibits the promotion of animal fur in editorial content and advertising. (Our guidelines recognize defined exceptions and apply to all new business and future content).”
Noted Kwon, “Hearst Magazines’ ban follows a five-day protest campaign against the media company by grassroots organization the Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade, which included a December 5, 2025 demonstration in the lobby of global headquarters Hearst Tower in New York City. The Coalition Against the Fur Trade said it would next be campaigning against the U.S. luxury brand Rick Owens.”
What would it take?
“What would it take to rid fashion of animal fur?” asked ANIMALS 24-7 editor Merritt Clifton on assignment for the long defunct Animals’ Agenda magazine in November 1986.
The assignment came just a few days after the annual “Fur Free Friday” demonstrations in New York City and elsewhere had mostly spotlighted the failure of a decade of protests to accomplish anything at all against the enormously cruel fur industry.
Emphasizing the cruelty of fur trapping and fur farming in often shockingly graphic literature, distributed with ever-increasing fervor, animal advocates had nonetheless seen steep annual increases in U.S. retail fur sales.
The fur trade looked unstoppable. But business information obtained by Clifton from inside the fur industry itself told a different story. The fur trade was not worried about anti-fur literature targeting cruelty, but was desperately afraid of literature targeting image.
Findings
The January/February 1987 edition of Animals’ Agenda published those findings.
Almost everyone in animal advocacy was skeptical that the fur trade was really worried about anything: U.S. retail fur sales in 1987 soared to $1.8 billion.
In January 1988, however, the Humane Society of the U.S. hired Clifton to do a six-month investigation of the complete economic and demographic structure of the fur trade, in search of an Achilles heel.
The 300-page analysis was to have been published by the Humane Society of the U.S in September 1988 in book form for the use of anti-fur activists everywhere.
“The Shame of Fur”
When the Humane Society of the U.S. reneged on the publishing contract, Clifton in October 1988 sent photocopies of the complete manuscript to all 19 national animal advocacy organizations then campaigning on the fur issue. All 19 used the information, albeit without attribution. None had been asked for, nor was any expected.
A twentieth photocopy was sent later to the founders of the Coalition Against the Fur Trade.
The Humane Society of the U.S. meanwhile launched a new anti-fur campaign building on the findings, “The Shame of Fur,” using illustrations showing not graphic cruelty, but just a woman in fur covering her face.
Fur industry market research showed that this ad in particular stuck in the minds of young women, from their teens through their early thirties.
These young women were not yet big fur wearers, but based on market history were expected to become the target market for “starter” fur garments during the next few years, meaning mostly mink coats priced at under $2,000, and were expected to become the major retail fur consumers within ten to 20 years.
Investigation
More precisely, those young women’s fathers, husbands, and boyfriends were expected to become the big fur buyers of the next generation, purchasing fur garments as gifts for their daughters, wives, and girlfriends to wear in public, thereby helping to advertise fur coats and accessories to the generations following.
“The Shame of Fur” campaign continued, but within “the movement,” amid many other anti-fur campaigns, was barely noticed, even as the fur industry analysts watched it and developed ulcers.
Why it worked was remarkably simple: most young women rapidly averted their gaze from graphic depictions of cruelty, and were therefore not deeply touched by the message, but were vulnerable to the more softly presented message that wearing fur might become socially unacceptable because of the cruelty.
What the fur trade already knew
The fur industry marketing gurus already knew this. What they did not know, and spent millions of dollars fruitlessly trying to find out, was how to counter it.
To a certain extent, the fur industry marketing gurus also knew, the cruelty associated with fur was a selling point, especially as one female fashion writer put it, to women who had “scratched” to reach their socio-economic status, and shamelessly enjoyed a “rich bitch” image.
Cruelty, to that market segment, was no deterrent to sales. Shame, creeping in on fur wearer’s enjoyment of flaunting their riches, very much was.
The fur trade crashed
U.S retail fur sales peaked in 1988 at $1.85 billion, then crashed to $950 million just five years later.
Once fur was no longer ubiquitous on the streets of New York, Chicago, Toronto, and San Francisco, among other fashion trade centers, the fur issue no longer drew animal advocacy donors’ money as it previously had.
The Humane Society of the U.S. discontinued the “Shame of Fur” campaign in 1992.
89% sales decline
But People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and others had only just begun to pursue the “Shame of Fur” theme, in their own words, in their own campaigns.
U.S. retail fur sales eventually crawled back over $1 billion a year, but in inflation-adjusted dollars never remotely came close to the 1987-1988 heights.
As of 2023, the U.S. retail fur trade claimed to be worth $574 million, but after adjustment for inflation, that was equivalent to only $208 million in 1988 dollars.
That amounted to an 89% decline in retail fur sales from peak.
“PETA paved the way for fur’s downfall with campaigns that reshaped fashion and public opinion,” boasted PETA staff writer Elena Waldman on December 10, 2025.
Going naked
“Our legendary ‘I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur’ ads,” Waldman continued, “sparked a cultural shift that prompted numerous brands to abandon fur.
“As top designers dropped fur, factory fur farms shuttered at a global scale, and the industry crumbled, we broadened our focus to expose cruelty in the skins, wool, and feather trades. But our mission to banish fur from fashion magazines never wavered.”
The association of mink farms in particular with the spread of the COVID-19 avian influenza virus also had a lot to do with factory fur farms closing around the world, but the trend had already begun before the first bats and birds sneezed on people and mink.
“Animal welfare & public morality”
The Fur Free Alliance, self-described as “a coalition of more than 45 animal protection groups in 30 nations,” claims to have helped, since 2000, “to ensure that more than 25 countries have introduced legislation to prohibit or restrict fur production on the basis of animal welfare and public morality.”
California, for instance, in 2019 legislatively banned sales of new fur garments, effective in 2023.
Continues the Fur-Free Alliance web site, “Trailblazing fashion designers such as Gucci, Armani and Michael Kors publicly abandoned animal fur, after working with the global network of the Fur Free Alliance, marking a turning point for cruelty-free fashion. Today over 1,600 brands have pledged to go fur-free.
Department stores & fur farms
“Department stores like Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s phased out fur sales by 2020,” the Fur-Free Alliance continues, “with other luxury brands following suit, reducing mainstream availability.
“In just five years,” beginning two years before COVID-19 hit, “the number of fur farms in the European Union fell from 4,350 in 2018, to 1,088 in 2023. Even in China, the world’s largest producer of fur, production has dropped by more than half since 2022.
“Despite this progress,” the Fur-Free Alliance admits, “there is still work to be done while fur brands, such as Fendi, Louis Vuitton and Woolrich continue to profit off of the backs of animals.”
Key members of the Fur-Free Alliance include Humane World for Animals and several international HWA subsidiaries.
Humane World for Animals
Observed Humane World for Animals in a December 2, 2025 media release, “Poland, the largest fur-producing country in Europe, raising and killing around three million mink, fox, raccoon dog and chinchilla for fur annually,” legislatively banned fur farming “weeks after a damning report by the European Food Safety Authority concluded that animal suffering is systemic on fur farms and keeping animals for their whole lives in small barren wire cages cannot meet basic animal welfare needs.
“This report,” Humane World for Animals continued, “was requested by the European Commission in the wake of a Fur Free Europe petition signed by 1.5 million European Union citizens which called for an EU-wide fur farming and sales ban. The Commission will publish its official legislative policy response by March 2026.
Six million animals on 1,200 fur farms
“Poland’s ban,” assessed Humane World for Animals, “further isolates the last few remaining member states that still allow fur farming― notably Finland, Denmark, Spain, Hungary and Greece.
“More than six million animals are kept on almost 1,200 fur farms across the European Union,” Humane World for Animals said, “but the practice is now fully or partially restricted in 24 member states—now including Poland—with the other bans implemented most recently in Romania (2024) and Lithuania (2023).
“Poland’s existing 200 fur farms have until January 2034 to close,” the Humane World for Animal media release noted, “although many are expected to stop business earlier than that due to compensation being offered to those closing within the first five years of the ban.
“The earlier that fur farmers apply for compensation and close their farms,” Humane World for Animals explained, “the higher the amount paid.”
The “Shame of Leather”?
“With fur ousted from magazines and runways,” Waldman of PETA concluded, “the fashion industry has admitted that suffering isn’t style—so why are animals’ stolen skins still part of the picture?
“Cows form lifelong friendships and grieve when they lose loved ones. Sheep are highly social and build deep bonds within their flocks. Alligators are devoted mothers who vigilantly protect their eggs,” recited Waldman.
“These individuals don’t want to suffer on filthy farms or be violently killed for coats, bags, or shoes—they simply want to live.”
(Daniel Leventhal photo)
Whether a “Shame of Leather” campaign will ever succeed as the “Shame of Fur” theme has remains to be seen.
But a similar lesson applies: people need not see cruelty to reject a cruel product. What they most need to see is others like themselves turning away from it.
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