Are Exotic Skins Out of Fashion?

Covid-19 may be the tipping point when it comes to crocodile, python, ostrich, and clothes.

Something was clearly missing from Stockholm Fashion Week’s virtual catwalk on Aug. 25, and it wasn’t just a physical audience.

Five days before, the show’s organizers said that fur and exotic skins had been banned from the lineup. Fur wasn’t surprising; among younger Western consumers, at least, fur has been steadily slipping down the rungs of popularity, prompting even luxury stalwarts like Burberry, Gucci and Prada to jettison the material in order to secure their holds on hearts and wallets alike.

Exotic skins, on the other hand, was new … ish. While London Fashion Week, one of the four major fashion weeks, banned fur in 2018, the only other runway events to outlaw exotic skins — the stuff of alligator handbags, python coats, galuchat wallets and stingray stilettos — were the minor Melbourne and Helsinki fashion weeks, also in 2018.

Signs abound, however, that a fur-like reckoning is coming for exotic skins, partly buoyed by the pandemic, which may be linked to illegal wildlife trafficking.

Before the coronavirus spread, brands like Chanel, Diane von Furstenberg and Mulberry were already dropping exotic hides, once inextricable from high fashion, because of animal-welfare concerns and other supply-chain issues. Amid the pandemic, the momentum has only grown.

Mulberry nixed crocodiles, ostriches and lizards in May. When PVH Corp., which owns Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, updates its animal-welfare policy later this year, exotic skins will join angora and fur on its list of verboten materials, according to a spokeswoman.

PVH declined to comment on the decision, but People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has been doing its best to link exotic skins, one of the final frontiers in the animal-rights battle, to wet markets in Wuhan, China — and was heavily lobbying the fashion group.

It is in these markets, where “blood and fluids from dead animals wash into the street,” said Dan Mathews, the senior vice president of PETA, that the coronavirus could have originated. The confinement and slaughtering of wild animals for bags and coats, PETA says, create conditions where pathogens similar to Covid-19 can spill over to infect humans.

Not everyone is buying it, however. At the June annual meeting for LVMH, the world’s largest luxury goods conglomerate, the company told PETA representatives (as part of its strategy, PETA had bought stock in LVMH in 2017) that animals like crocodiles and alligators remain a “precious commodity.”

Like fellow exotic-skins holdout Kering, which operates Balenciaga, Gucci and Saint Laurent, LVMH established its own reptile farms to ensure the integrity of its stock. But animal activists like PETA argue that such controls are not enough, and the only good animal trade is no animal trade at all.

Now groups on both sides of the battle are wondering if the coronavirus will be the tipping point that finally changes consumer minds, and in so doing hastens the anti-exotics trajectory of the luxury industry.

The Pelts and the Pandemic

“I think if people don’t connect the dots, we’re going to be repeating this pandemic,” Mr. Mathews said. “The way we treat animals is directly related to how this virus sprung out into the world. And it’s related to both food and fashion.”

This idea seemed to gain credibility when, in May, the Dutch government ordered mink farms in the Netherlands to cull 10,000 animals after infected mink were discovered on 10 farms where they are raised for their pelts, most of which are exported, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality. The culling was mandated out of concerns that affected farms could serve as long-term reservoirs of disease, bouncing the contagion back and forth between humans and animals.

The mink are believed to have contracted the virus from their handlers in April. The following month, Dutch authorities identified two cases of humans who were infected by animals, the only known animal-to-human transmission to date.

The issue further hit home in August, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that mink on two farms in Utah tested positive for the virus — the first such confirmed cases in the United States — after what the agency described as an “unusually large” number of the animals dying.

The affected farms also reported infections in people who had contact with the mink, which the U.S.D.A. said are known to be susceptible to the virus. There is no evidence that animals, including mink, play a “significant role” in spreading the coronavirus to humans, it said in a statement.

Roughly 60 percent of all known infectious diseases and 75 percent of all new or emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic in origin, meaning they’re transmissible from animals to humans, according the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But many biologists and conservationists say there is a difference between mammals and reptiles, and that the situation when it comes to exotic skins is not nearly as clear-cut as it may seem.

“Reptiles, if anything, are a solution, not the problem,” said Daniel Natusch, a conservation biologist and member of the Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Specialist Group at the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

It turns out that, while there may be plenty of moral reasons not to buy an alligator Birkin, fear of a new pandemic may not be among them. It is even possible that the trade in exotic skins is making the planet healthier.

From Reptile to Person?

Not only is catching Covid-19 from an alligator or crocodile next to impossible because of the genetic disparity between humans and reptiles — we share few of the same cellular “locks” and “keys” that would facilitate viral transmission — but also, Dr. Natusch said, “If it wasn’t for the luxury industry, huge areas of habitat and all the individual animals that lived in them would have been bulldozed or drained and turned into agricultural land or pasture for cows.”

Most crocodilians come from ranching systems, where eggs are harvested from the wild and then hatched and raised on site. Snakes and lizards, Dr. Natusch said, are largely caught from the wild. Because both eggs and live animals are renewable resources, they require intact habitats to thrive.

The greater their value, the greater the incentive luxury goods purveyors, Indigenous communities and local governments have to protect them. According to trade data from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (Cites), 11.7 million products made from reptiles were imported into the United States from 2003 to 2013.

Indeed, several scientific studies cataloged in the U.S. National Library of Medicine have established a link between deforestation and the emergence of novel zoonotic pathogens, since forest destruction increases contact between humans and wild species.

If companies boycott exotic skins, “far more animals are going to die, far more habitats are going to be cut down, biodiversity will be increasingly lost, far more animals will undergo severe welfare-compromised treatment, and humans will be at even greater risk than we were before of zoonotic diseases,” Dr. Natusch said. “There’s a bit of irony.”

That’s not to say international agreements like Cites don’t need tightening up or that illegal trade is not a problem.

“Anytime anything’s illegal, it’s outside any existing regulatory control mechanism, such as health inspections, veterinary checks, sanitation checks and that kind of thing,” said Crawford Allan, the senior director of wildlife crime at the World Wildlife Fund. “And the risk increases when you are taking animals from new and remote places where they may be carrying a new disease that hasn’t been come across before by science and people.”

In a post-pandemic world, auditing and traceability will become more critical than ever. “In light of Covid-19, everybody is having to look at the way they operate,” Mr. Allan said, suggesting that any breeder include “methods and measures that can reassure their client base about the legitimacy of their operation, the legality and how it is minimizing risk throughout.”

Fashion Responds

Despite, or because of, all this, Edwina McKechnie, the associate director of Business for Social Responsibility, a global nonprofit that works with brands on sustainability issues, says she hasn’t seen a shift in luxury companies away from exotic skins because of the pandemic. “In fact, we’re seeing the continued focus,” Ms. McKechnie said.

In 2019, LVMH promoted what it billed as the world’s first standard for responsible crocodilian leather sourcing, along with three pilot farms that supply to Heng Long, a “first and only” exotic skins tannery in Singapore that LVMH acquired in 2011 to seize better control of its supply chain. Jean Baptiste Voisin, the strategy director, said in a statement at the time that existing regulations “seemed insufficient,” because of their weaker traceability requirements.

The pandemic, an LVMH spokeswoman wrote in an email, has only “accentuated the need to preserve the biodiversity of our planet.” Biosecurity rules under Cites, LVMH said, have been reinforced since the initial outbreak, and LVMH is “committed to their strict implementation.”

Dr. Dominic Travis, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Medicine, worries that the loudest voices in the room aren’t looking at the situation holistically. Outlawing anything, whether the wildlife trade in general or the exotic skins trade in particular, could drive it further underground and make it more insidious and harder to regulate, he said.

And there may be unintended consequences for the broader ecosystem. Some critics of faux materials have argued that replacing skins, leathers and furs with petroleum-based “vegan” products that persist for hundreds of years only compounds the planet’s plastic crisis.

“When anybody gets too specific on one single solution, I tend to get concerned,” Dr. Travis said. “We’re here because we’re not thinking about the system, or the whole spider web. And the change we need to make is to think about that more, not less. When you call for yanking on one strand of that web, it just continues the problem that got us here in the first place.”

By Jasmin Malik Chua

Sept. 21, 2020

Fendi Selects Kim Jones to Replace Karl Lagerfeld

The British fashion designer will oversee Fendi haute couture, ready-to-wear and fur, but will also continue as artistic director of Dior Men.

The job of artistic designer at Fendi has finally been filled.

The storied Roman fashion house and fur specialist announced on Wednesday that the British fashion designer Kim Jones would replace Karl Lagerfeld, who died in February of last year, in the role.

Mr. Jones will be responsible for the haute couture, ready-to-wear and fur collections for women, Fendi said in a statement. He will also maintain his current position as artistic director of Dior Men in Paris.

It is the second major designer move by Fendi’s owner, LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the world’s largest luxury group by sales, since the coronavirus pandemic began. (The French company appointed Matthew Williams as Givenchy’s new designer in June.) As such, it reflects the luxury group’s commitment to forging ahead with its brands and buzzy designers, even as questions swirl around the future of fashion, shopping and the entire traditional show system.

In a statement, LVMH’s chief executive, Bernard Arnault, called Mr. Jones “a great talent,” adding that he had proved his ability to adapt to the codes of assorted LVMH houses “with great modernity and audacity.”

The hire represents a doubling down on a bet by LVMH that fur will continue to be a hallmark of luxury, at a time when it is increasingly being seen as an unethical relic of another era. And as the industry faces a reckoning on race and diversity, the hiring of a white man already in its employ at Dior for one of the most plum design titles in the business also could be seen as going against the trend of confronting fashion’s systemic racism, and LVMH’s stated commitments to tackling that.

The choice of Mr. Jones is the culmination of more than a year of discussions and apparent soul-searching by LVMH, which built Fendi into a billion-dollar brand. Fendi has been a core pillar of its fashion empire since it purchased an initial stake in the company from the Fendi family in a joint venture with Prada in 1999 (in 2001, LVMH became the brand’s sole owner).

Along with Silvia Fendi, the only family member still in the company, who will continue to design Fendi accessories and men’s wear once Mr. Jones arrives, Mr. Lagerfeld was integral to that growth. Over a 54-year tenure at Fendi, Mr. Lagerfeld created the concept of “fun fur” when fur was seen as the stale province of the bourgeoisie. He held “haute fourrure” shows on the couture calendar even as fur increasingly fell out of fashion. He and Ms. Fendi appeared on the catwalk together at the end of every women’s wear show.

Though it was often suggested that Ms. Fendi, who referred to Mr. Lagerfeld as a mentor, might assume sole creative ownership of the brand after his death, executives at LVMH were open about their belief in the benefit of two creative personalities sparking off each other. (Along with Mr. Jones, another name thought to be in the running for the position was Maria Grazia Chiuri, artistic director of women’s wear at Dior.)

Designer pairings can be a risk, given the egos that are sometimes involved. But along with Miuccia Prada’s recent decision to name Raf Simons as co-creative director of Prada, pairing Mr. Jones and Ms. Fendi may also signal a new approach to team-building in fashion. A fetishization of the single visionary has more often been the norm, and several high-profile talents like Mr. Jones and Virgil Abloh have increasingly juggled multiple design responsibilities across top fashion houses.

Fendi’s chief executive, Serge Brunschwig, called Mr. Jones “one of the most talented and relevant designers of today.”

For his part, Mr. Jones said: “I would like to profoundly thank Mr. Arnault, Mr. Brunschwig and Silvia Venturini Fendi for this incredible opportunity. Working across two such prestigious houses is a true honor as a designer and to be able to join the house of Fendi as well as continuing my work at Dior Men’s is a huge privilege.”

A graduate of the London art-and-design school Central Saint Martins and one of the brightest stars on the luxury men’s wear scene, Mr. Jones has long been ascendant at LVMH. Before joining Dior Men’s in 2018, he worked at Louis Vuitton as their men’s wear designer for seven years.

There, he brought his longstanding love and encyclopedic knowledge of luxe street wear — athletic tech fabrics, big sneakers, oversize graphic T-shirts and elegant tracksuits, but also crocodile backpacks and cashmere baseball tops — to a superbrand that had been overly content to sell its male clientele little more than monogrammed leather cases, belts and wallets.

More recently, at Dior, his shows merging suiting with streetwear and reworking tailoring for a modern audience generated buzz beyond the men’s market. They have shown Mr. Jones to be more plugged in to the outside world than some of his industry peers.

In July, for example, a week after the brand was criticized for casting an all-white ensemble of models for its women’s wear couture presentation as Black Lives Matter protests raged worldwide, Mr. Jones featured only Black models in his spring 2021 collection. It was designed in collaboration with the acclaimed Ghanaian portrait painter Amoako Boafo. In December, Mr. Jones was named designer of the year at the Fashion Awards in London.

He will be expected to bring some of that magic to Fendi. The brand has seen robust growth in recent years, fueled by its savvy leather accessories, fur designs and a burgeoning fan base in China and Southeast Asia.

LVMH does not regularly break down the sales performances of individual brands in its portfolio. But it has disclosed that in 2017, Fendi passed the billion-dollar mark in annual sales for the first time. Now, even the most prestigious luxury brands are facing colossal challenges because of the pandemic, which will force luxury industry sales to contract by 25 percent to 45 percent this year, according to estimates by the consulting company Boston Consulting Group.

Nonetheless, Fendi stalwarts appeared bullish about the boost that the house would get from Mr. Jones’s hire.

“I look forward to taking the Fendi universe to the next level with Kim,” Ms. Fendi said.

Though Fendi is planning to hold a physical show on Sept. 23 in front of a reduced audience during Milan Fashion Week, Mr. Jones’s debut collection is planned for February, the company said.

The industry is hoping that by then, shows will once again be heralded live events — all the better for a blockbuster debut.

By Elizabeth Paton and Vanessa Friedman

Sept. 9, 2020

With Homecoming, Beyoncé Fully Leverages Her Internet Dominance

The megastar has always been able to command the internet's attention. And yet she's managed to exceed her reach once again.

Deep into Homecoming, Beyoncé's doc and concert film from her performance at last year's Coachella, the artist explains her sense of purpose in creating the show, a celebration of both her decades-long career and a tribute to America's HBCUs. "As a black woman, I used to feel like the world wanted me to stay in my little box. And black women often feel underestimated," she says. "I wanted us to be proud of not only the show, but the process. … It was important to me that everyone who had never seen themselves represented felt like they were on that stage with us." It was integral, then, that she released the performance on the largest stages possible—not just the one in Indio, California.

Beyoncé has always commanded the internet's attention, always been able to direct its narrative. She did it when she surprise-dropped her self-titled album, and its visual companion, on iTunes in 2013. She did it again in April 2016 with another late-night landmine: Lemonade, the visual album that debuted exclusively on Tidal at the same time as its companion short film aired on HBO. This time around, though, the megastar is out to make sure everyone who wants and needs to experience Homecoming can do so, releasing the concert film on Netflix and an accompanying 40-song, two-hour-long album on—deep breath—Apple Music, Amazon Music, SoundCloud, Deezer, Spotify, YouTube Music, and Tidal, all at once.

Beyoncé's sneak-attack playbook has become a bit familiar—it all started with the release of Beyoncé, which mysteriously appeared in the iTunes store one December night, no notice, no leaks—but there are a few remarkably different aspects to the release of Homecoming. First, this album wasn't gated as a Tidal-only exclusive like Lemonade was. Beyoncé and her husband, Jay-Z, are co-owners of the music-streaming service, so when they team up to put her music on Tidal, the service presumably it gets a, ahem, wave of new users. This wasn't an Apple-only exclusive either, and it is on Spotify, the service that famously didn't get Lemonade. Just last year Beyoncé rapped that if she "gave two fucks, two fucks about streaming numbers [she] would've put Lemonade up on Spotify." She likely still doesn't need, or care about, the numbers, but she does want the access to be nearly universal.

It's also notable that Beyoncé turned to Netflix over HBO. By putting Homecoming on Netflix, she chose to make this performance—a historical document in its own right—available to the biggest crowd possible. (Netflix has 149 million subscribers across the world.) There's also Beyoncé's business savvy on display. As one Twitter user pointed out, she recorded her history-making Coachella performance, which had already live-streamed on YouTube, and then turned around and made that video into a Netflix film, effectively minting money several times off of the same performance.

But this wasn't simply an exercise in capitalism and record sales or streaming views (though it will certainly be downloaded and streamed plenty). This was about Beyoncé knowing the internet will pay attention—and using that attention to tell an important story. The HBCUs, as the artist points out in Homecoming, are an integral part of the American experience. Yet they are also a segment of public life that isn't celebrated in mainstream pop culture nearly enough. Beyoncé's performance on that Coachella stage was the largest of her career—second only to maybe the Super Bowl, which gave her far less screen time but also the opportunity to again blow up the internet by releasing "Formation"—and by streaming it, recording it, and releasing it on nearly every platform around, she ensured that no one missed it, or its message of legacy and empowerment.

"Instead of me pulling out my flower crown," Beyoncé says in Homecoming, "it was important that I brought our culture to Coachella. Creating something that will live beyond me, that will make people feel open and like they're watching magic." Homecoming is that—a once-in-a-lifetime performance by one of the world's greatest living artists that our hyperconnected world allows everyone to celebrate together.

By Andrea Valdez and Angela Watercutter

April 17, 2019