Copenhagen Fashion Week has announced a ban on exotic skins and feathers for their 2025 shows, raising the bar for sustainability in fashion.
Copenhagen will be the first high-profile event on record to take this monumental step of banning the usage of exotic skins and feathers from collections. This follows the ban on furs during 2022 Fashion Week, signaling a high fashion revolution. In this, runway fashion focuses have shifted from style and extravagance to compassion, ethics, and environmentalism.
Fashion today has become fashion for the future:
In recent years, the usage of furs has become increasingly déclassé, leading many companies to shift to feathers. As a result, feathers have been trending. But are feathers and skins better than fur? The short answer is no. The process of harvesting feathers and exotic skins are no less horrific than the process involved in harvesting fur —animals suffering psychologically and physically. Crocodiles and alligators endure horrific suffering in order for their skin to be used for fashion products like shoes, bags, and belts, their seventy-year lifespan cut short at the age of three—ostriches, the most commonly exploited bird for feathers, fare even worse. The majority of ostrich farms are concentrated in South Africa where they go unregulated, with their slaughter involving getting stunned by an electric bolt, hung upside down, shackled, and bled out.
In past years top fashion brands like Burberry and Chanel have pushed for a ban on the use of exotic skins, with Chanel eliminating them in pre-fall 2019 and Burberry following suit in 2022. But exotic skins and feathers long evaded the stigma of furs as their appearance is less visceral.
“It’s really difficult for people to connect with the reality that a crocodile or a snake is absolutely sentient in the same way that a fox or a mink is,” Founding Director of Collective Fashion Justice, Emma Håkansson, told the Guardian,
When consumers look at models strutting down the runway, they don’t imagine feathers and skins and connect it to something they find stylish and can desirable.
Set to be placed into effect on January 1, 2025, Copenhagen Fashion Week’s sustainability requirements have set a new bar for eco-requirements. Henceforth, in order to show their collections, brands must meet the requirements asked. But these conditions are not one size fits all– instead they are collaborative and strategic.
Fashion houses will be able to attend a series of webinars that explain the requirements in more detail, and will also receive tools and strategic consulting to set new sustainability milestones, track progress and measure impact. This framework has been adopted by several national and Nordic partners (Copenhagen International Fashion Fair, Norwegian Fashion Hub, and Oslo Runway) who will implement these requirements over the coming years, underscoring Copenhagen’s belief that only a united industry can achieve environmental, social, and cultural sustainability.
As the highest-profile event on the fashion calendar, these moves make Copenhagen the capital of sustainable fashion, pushing forward a revolution in the sustainability and compassion of the fashion industry as a whole.
