Activists, including one blow-up critter, gathered outside a Rick Owens store in New York City last month. It’s part of the broader campaign against fur, which has achieved quite a lot lately. Images courtesy of the Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade (CAFT).
Hi there. Sustainability in fashion doesn’t get big wins very often, but this week we’ve got something to celebrate.
See, a series of high profile animal fur bans happened at the close of 2025, demonstrating the growing support for animal justice from all areas of the industry. It raises another crucial point: when done right, sustained activism actually works to shift things we once thought were immovable.
As the campaigners win in this one area, it’s worth asking where that momentum could go next. After all, many animal justice activists have been narrowly focused on fur the past few decades, and that narrow focus paid off. That’s what Amy explores for this Veganuary issue. She reached the depths of Reddit, spoke to experts about where campaigners are setting their sights now, and unpicked how this can be a blueprint for wider change.
Thanks for reading,
Amy and JD
What’s happening?
“Rick Owens is just another corporate tool!” shouted an anti-fur protester in a video taken inside the cult brand’s New York City boutique during a five-day campaign last month. The protests were organised by the Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade (CAFT), which targeted stores and top-level employees. While the media has long covered direct-action protestors negatively, activists know they can be an effective measure when paired with concerted action across society and industry. Owens quickly issued a statement banning fur and removed existing mink and beaver products from sale immediately.
It’s a sign that the tide is turning. In the space of just 90 days at the end of last year, animal fur was banished from the pages of every major fashion magazine and the runways of some of the world’s biggest brands, including Owens. It’s one bright spot showing how organised action at all levels does pay off.
First, back in October, Condé Nast (publisher of Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair, and more) slipped a note into its sustainability strategy about prohibiting new animal fur. Campaigners from the CAFT had been protesting outside the homes of Vogue employees for months, though a spokesperson for the publisher indicated this had been one of its undisclosed values for years, per WWD.
Then in early December, New York Fashion Week announced it would clear its runways of fur from September 2026 onwards after consulting with Humane World for Animals and Collective Fashion Justice. Hearst Magazines, which owns Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire and Town & Country, also announced a ban.
On top of all this, Poland, the world’s second largest fur producer, signed into a law an immediate ban on new fur farms, giving existing ones eight years to close, as President Karol Nawrocki noted the legislation’s wide support from the Polish population.
Sustained campaigner pressure works. Consumer pressure works. Raising your voice works.
Are you seeing a pattern here? Sustained campaigner pressure works. Consumer pressure works. Raising your voice works. These bans happened in the space of a few months, but it’s taken years of work behind the scenes by campaigners.
Their work offers a template worth studying. It combined narrow, achievable demands (not “fix fashion,” but “ban fur”) with pressure from multiple directions simultaneously: direct action, consumer shifts, industry consultation, and legislative routes. Each win made the next easier to secure, creating reputational risk for holdouts. It's the inside-outside strategy at work, with some campaigners engaging on fashion councils, others protesting outside executives’ homes. Neither alone would have worked. Together, they shifted something that seemed immovable.
This week, I looked through the evidence showing how effective the long-fought campaign against fur has been, and what that means for other causes. Because even if fur isn’t a key issue for you, this is a strong case study for how targeted activism with narrow goals can pay off when it’s driven by collective action. Emma Håkansson, founding director of Collective Fashion Justice (CFJ), spoke to me, saying: “We’re all chipping away at the walls of this old and archaic system and when a pillar falls, many have contributed to it.”
We're all chipping away at the walls of this old and archaic system and when a pillar falls, many have contributed to it.
What are people saying?
That’s not to say that there hasn’t been any resistance to the recent bans. Fur-use is, like many long-established industry issues, a practice that some corners of fashion simply feel entitled to (or, perhaps, are resigned to), and they’re strong-willed about it. A case in point: the Rick Owens subreddit got heated about all this. Owens is famed for his use of animal materials, worked for fur brand Revillon in the 2000s before setting up an in-house fur atelier, and has a fandom that reaches cult-like levels. And those fans kicked off.
“Can’t stand people forcing up their opinions like this,” one user commented on a video of the protests. Other Owens fans echoed these sentiments, which are similar to those the fur industry repeats time and again.
For instance, Mark Oaten, chief executive officer of the International Fur Federation, sounded rattled in October at the prospect of fashion going further. He told WWD: “It’s disappointing that Condé Nast has taken this decision [to ban fur] and it suggests they are frightened by animal activists. Next they will have to ban wool or leather adverts, as the activities won’t stop at fur.”
Next they will have to ban wool or leather adverts, as the activities won't stop at fur.
To which activists might reply, good point, Mark. Why should fashion stop at fur?
Certainly, the issue of synthetic materials is commonly cited whenever the prospect of moving away from animal derived materials comes up, as Redditors said. “Woohoo let’s keep wearing plastics and harmful chemicals!!! organic material is the real enemy!!” was one typical comment. “Leather and fur over that plastic shit all day,” another wrote.
Whether ditching fur will lead to a greater reliance on plastic-based alternatives is a big issue — media reports on the recent bans asked the question, and fur advocates like to use it as reasoning for animal materials being more sustainable.
In December, Lucianne Tonti wrote in Vogue Business that sustainability consultants are certainly concerned that “the alternative to fur is just swapping one set of problems (animal cruelty), for another (reliance on fossil fuels and the disposable fast fashion it creates),” but Tonti notes there’s no reliable comparison between synthetic and real fur, nor is there any proof that bio- and plant-based material innovations are commercially viable or scalable.
One answer, then, is to eschew both, as anxiety.eco has outlined to in our own editorial policies: we’ve committed to not promoting any virgin animal materials or virgin synthetics.
It’s quite possible that there are some anxiety.eco readers on the Owens subreddit, where a decent proportion of users, to be fair, celebrated the fur ban and then posed a challenge to the brand, questioning whether Owens even went far enough: “Fur harvesting is beyond cruel most of the time, but it’s kinda pointless if he’s still using other animal products like leather. It should be 100% vegan if that’s the direction he’s steering.” “If fur is cruelty why isn’t exotics [animal skins]?” asked another user.
What to keep an eye on?
Can this win become a template for animal justice in fashion? Is there a future where python is prohibited from magazines and runways, too? And then there’s the biggest challenge facing vegan fashion proponents: what about leather? It is, after all, the most contentious animal-derived material.
The fraught arguments around leather’s longevity and its sourcing as a so-called “co-product” of the meat industry keep on churning in the Rick Owens subreddit and won’t be solved here, either. But there was once a time where no one could imagine Vogue prohibiting fur, and yet here we are. So what are campaigners setting their sights on next?
“For us to be consistent we then must end the killing of all animals specifically for fashion as an obvious next step,” Håkansson says. “That means all wild animals like crocodiles and snakes killed for skins, ostriches killed for their feathers. That’s why we encourage fashion councils to move from fur bans to wildlife-free bans, as we did with Copenhagen Fashion Week which is a leader in the space.” In fact, for Håkansson, feathers are the new fur, and they’re in her sights for a ban, and CFJ has already researched the viable (and beautiful) alternatives to wild animal feathers.
It seems impossible until there's a tipping point, and then just like that, it suddenly seems inevitable.
It’s worth noting that while these latest bans are a success, the work continues, because Milan and Paris Fashion Weeks still haven’t prohibited fur, nor have some major brands. The CAFT is on it, with executive director Suzie Stork telling WWD it was putting its “full attention on Berluti and the other LVMH holdouts that continue to profit from the cruel fur trade.”
Håkansson points out that with every ban, “my and our job in convincing the industry to ethically evolve becomes easier every time we can point to a peer who has just done it, when we can show the tide is turning and they better join in or be left behind.” And that’s how change happens. Like fur activism, it seems impossible until there’s a tipping point, and then just like that, it suddenly seems inevitable. There’s much for the so-called “sustainable fashion” movement to learn from the success campaigners have achieved with fur.
