Leather & Animal Cruelty with Emma Hakansson - "If we want total ethics in fashion, we can't ignore animals."

Why are animals so often left out of the conversation about sustainable and ethical fashion? We talk about people and planet, but less often about our fellow living creatures. This week's guest Emma Hakansson wants to change that. She challenges us to rethink the idea of animals as commodities - they are, she says, someone, not something.

Emma is the founder of Collective Fashion Justice, an organisation that puts animals as well as people and planet at the heart of an ethical fashion industry. A self-described “activist, passionate about anti-speciesism, autonomy and collective liberation,” Emma is also an author, her books include How Veganism Can Save Us (Survive the Modern World) and she was one of the producers of, and also appears in the documentary, Slay.

In this interview, we zero in on leather. “By the time it has been turned into a bag, a pair of shoes, a belt or a jacket, we tend to forget it, leather is skin,” says Emma. “Thanks to long supply chains, the power of the global leather industry and big luxury brands, plus the pretty language used to market fancy handbag materials, most of us never think about how leather is produced. As with supermarket meat and dairy products, we’ve totally disassociated from its origins." Emma believes cruelty should never be in style. She’d like us to check our morals, and ask ourselves how comfortable we really are treating animals as a commodity.

Whatever your view on that, the way that most leather is produced in such high volumes today is an environmental nightmare, she says, while its supply chains conceal as much social injustice as cut-and-sew does for the garment industry - it just gets less attention.

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