This is an edition of the newsletter Show Notes, in which Samuel Hine reports from the front row of the spring and fall fashion weeks. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
During Friday’s Gucci show at Milan Fashion Week, there was a quick but unmistakable tear in the chic, minimalist daydream conjured by Sabato De Sarno’s highly-anticipated debut collection. All of a sudden, as the models strutted through the room, a woman in a black dress slipped into the lineup and joined them. Even before she raised the sign in her hands, everybody knew what was going on: PETA, the animal rights activist organization, had crashed yet another runway.
At that point, the kerfuffle was almost routine. As one industry columnist put it on X: “The PETA protestors [are] going to more fashion week shows than me 😭.” This season alone, PETA protestors have hit three of the biggest events in each of the major cities: Coach in New York, Burberry in London, and Gucci in Milan. Though the Gucci crasher was swiftly hustled off the runway and out of the venue, video of the action swiftly spread on social media, and the recent protests have been covered by CNN, The Guardian, and Vogue.
Besides the usual front row chatter about designer job horse trading and which front rows Kylie and Timothée will sit in, just about everybody in Paris has been wondering which brand is next—and how exactly PETA has been pulling it off.
“That's the one thing where I can't tell you much,” said Ashley Byrne, a 16-year PETA veteran who serves as the groups’ director of outreach communications. Byrne called me a few days after Gucci to explain the context for the spate of fashion week protests, which are aimed at the industry’s use of leather and exotics skins. Unsurprisingly, she couldn’t divulge the activists’ tactics, but hinted that their recent success has been the result of careful planning. “It’s not easy to just walk into any major show at fashion week,” she said. “It takes some maneuvering.”
As with any highly visible event covered by tons of journalists and photographers, people have long tried to jump into the spotlight at fashion shows. Topless Femen members interrupted Nina Ricci a decade ago. A streaker hit Prabal Gurung in 2014. Sasha Baron Cohen, as Bruno, waltzed through an Agatha Ruiz de la Prada show in Milan in 2008 to promote his movie. (He was then arrested.) More recently, climate group Extinction Rebellion has pulled off runway stunts at Dior and Louis Vuitton, and a model at Rick Owens advocated (maybe) for the assassination of Angela Merkel before being punched by the designer backstage. (“I don't mind drama, but I don't like death threats," Owens said at the time.) Protests are simply part of fashion week’s frisson of excitement.
And PETA basically invented the whole game. In 1991, as the war on fur was gaining steam, three PETA activists stripped down and jumped on the catwalk at Oscar De La Renta. The naked demonstration garnered global headlines—and PETA quickly became the bane of the industry. If a brand used fur, which practically all of them did, they probably had a PETA run-in during the aughts, when activists regularly unfurled “Fur Kills” signs in front of photographers at shows like Valentino, Versace, and Jean Paul Gaultier.
With the dawn of the social media age, as well as the increased presence of VIPs and celebrities, brands have gone to great lengths to lock down their events. As I wrote in June, show invites have become almost comically sophisticated. Major European houses typically employ multiple security checks, and many, like Prada, have implemented strict ID requirements at the door.
Among the fashion press corps, intimately familiar with the occasionally rough security at these events, PETA’s successes have been received with a sort of begrudging respect. “What do they know that the Italian teenagers outside can’t figure out?” asked one writer at Gucci. The theories I’ve heard range from simple to somewhat outlandish. Did the Coach protestors tailgate in with a celebrity’s entourage? Or did they hide in the backstage bathroom for an entire day, as an editor claimed?
According to Byrne, PETA has a high success rate when they target specific events. “When we decide to do something or get in someplace, it tends to happen,” she said. Byrne explained that the group “brought back in force” runway crashes this season to ramp up pressure on brands known for their leather goods and/or angora wool, which Byrne described as the group’s next targets now that fur is a dirty word. (Most major brands have phased out fur products in the past decade. Gucci disavowed fur in 2017, with Coach and Burberry following in 2018.)
Though the industry’s post-fur era is arguably more due to changing consumer tastes than activist pressure, Byrne told me PETA is replicating their previous campaigns. “Now most people associate fur with this very violent, controversial industry,” said Byrne. “There's absolutely a stigma about using fur. They don't have that association right now with these other products. So we know it is going to take something that is a little more bold and hard to miss to bring these other things to their attention.” Byrne noted that PETA’s impromptu models risk arrest every time they sneak in, though generally they’re just thrown out of the venue.
As with all PETA protests, reactions have been mixed, though some showgoers have mentioned that they prefer “Ban Exotic Skins” signs to naked people and fake blood, two characteristics of sidewalk demonstrations PETA has brought to fashion weeks in years past. Meanwhile, Paris is bracing for more crashers. As Paris Fashion Week got underway on Monday, a publicist told me that it was all but impossible to stop them. “There are 200-300 people who work at these events,” he told me, with a knowing glance. “Between lighting, sound, catering, beauty, you have people who are sympathetic to the cause.” As I suspected, the crashers generally seem to have inside help. According to a source at a marquee French luxury brand, several houses have dropped freelance production staff for just that reason.
I asked Byrne if she could at least give me a hint of PETA’s plans this week. “I think it’s safe to say that PETA will have a presence at Paris Fashion Week,” she said. “The form that it will take remains to be seen, but it’s guaranteed that they will be there.”
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