Persuasive Letter to Luxury Brand (Gucci)

Dear Gucci:

At your website, you advertise yourselves as “Influential, innovative and progressive” (Gucci). Most people who are familiar with your brand believe you are influential and innovative, but most have to stop and think about progressive. Progressives see the world as it could be in the future. In many ways, Gucci’s fashion looks to the past. For years, Gucci used furs and leather as staples in their fashion lines, and so did many other high-end and low-end fashion houses for that matter. However, fur has come to be considered off-limits. Innovation that you are so proud of has created excellent quality faux fur and thankfully, you and many other brands have elected to use it, or at least that is what you say. If nothing else, you have agreed to raise your fur-bearing animals on farms where you claim there is no cruelty, but just keeping animals in cages for their entire lives constitutes cruelty. Killing them by skinning them alive and throwing them on the heap of other animals who have suffered the same fate is also cruelty and it is of the worst kind. No one sees that as progressive action on your part. What will it take to persuade you that killing animals for fashion regardless of how humanely it is done is not a sustainable practice, something else you also claim to endorse?

When animal activist groups such as the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) started protesting in very visible ways such as throwing animal blood onto the fur coats of high-fashion models and celebrities, the result was that eventually those who chose to wear fur got the message. Either they stopped wearing fur, or just did not wear it in public much. Perhaps some animal rights activists thought that they had won a great victory. It was a victory to be sure, fewer animals would now be slaughtered so that Kim Kardashian or Giselle Bundchen could wear their skin to have dinner with Kanye West or Tom Brady. However, the animal rights activists did not think about the leather boots that West or Brady were wearing. What about the animals who were sacrificed for that fashion choice? Some say that the leather used for fashion in the western world is often the skins of cows and pigs (and other animals) that are slaughtered for meat, so it is just a good way to use the whole animal and not waste any of it after it is sacrificed. That is not a bad argument until one looks at the boots that these men are wearing. One is alligator and the other is snakeskin, probably Python.

It is more difficult to feel sad for two of the meanest animals on earth, or at least that is the stereotype these animals have. Alligators and crocodiles, because their skin is used also, eat people and pets all the time. They are fierce and deadly and no one really loves them or pythons either. Pythons are usually not considered as fearsome as alligators and crocodiles, but they have been known to kill people. They just are not as apt to hang around people unless they are captured and kept as a pet. Perhaps these scary, deadly animals have a bad reputation as predators, but they are animals. One cannot shame them for their behavior because it is their instinct for survival that drives them to it. Hanging them from trees and skinning them alive is not done out of fear for them but out of love for money. Predators or not, alligators, crocodiles and pythons or any snake do not deserve to be skinned simply for the sake of fashion, and Gucci, you are one of the biggest manufacturer and marketer of animal skin products. That is neither progressive nor sustainable.

Perhaps you do not know how the animals that you use to make shoes, clothes, handbags, belts and other accessories are treated and killed in order for you to turn them into overpriced elements of fashion that some people just have to have. Even those who love high fashion are starting to complain that some fashion companies are using animal skins. Christina Russo of Fashionista says, “About 500,000 python skins are exported annually from Southeast Asia, with the overwhelming majority of those skins ending up in the European fashion industry. Luxury brands cited in the report are as high profile as Prada, Gucci, Hermes, Dior, Burberry, Giorgio Armani and Chanel” (Russo). Russo’s article wrote her article in 2014 after the CITES, an international agreement regarding the trade in endangered plants and animals. “Because the trade in wild animals and plants crosses borders between countries, the effort to regulate it requires international cooperation to safeguard certain species from over-exploitation. CITES was conceived in the spirit of such cooperation. Today, it accords varying degrees of protection to more than 35,000 species of animals and plants, whether they are traded as live specimens, fur coats or dried herbs” (CITES). According to CITES