Variety/Creative Commons

During a rare Alexander McQueen fashion show in New York last night, the designer (whose intentional use of fox heads and bird skulls has been called "desperate" by PETA’s president) got more than he bargained for. In the middle of the show, two PETA members with blood-red paint covering their hands leapt onto the catwalk and displayed signs reading, "Fur on your back, blood on your hands," before being tackled by security guards and dragged off the stage. As PETA President Ingrid Newkirk puts it,

Hopefully this will serve as a message to McQueen and others who condone the torture of animals for their designs that compassionate people will not continue to indulge their cruel fetishes, and that their archaic sense of what’s “fashionable” will soon be little more than an ugly footnote in the history books. That, or they’ll obliviously keep it up until some legislator has the good sense to ban fur farming for good and put them out of business. Whichever comes sooner is fine with me.

I’ll update this entry with more info as this story develops.

I probably don't mention my colleagues in peta2 as much as I should on this blog. This is primarily because I am jealous of their youth, their vivacity, and their general "too-cool-for-school" attitude. But sometimes they put something together so good that it can't be ignored (no matter how hard one might try), and their new "Fur Is Dead" campaign definitely falls into that category.

They've partnered with the folks at Skelanimals to help garner support for their "100,000 strong against fur" petition, and judging by the number of signatures so far (38,631!), the whole thing's going pretty well. You can check out the site here. The photo gallery of kids wearing the peta2 "Fur Is Dead" bunny ears is more or less fantastic.

After TMZ posted documents last week showing that Aretha Franklin is facing foreclosure, the story has been reported everywhere. Well, despite the fact that we've had the occasional run-in with the Queen of Soul, we're willing to bury the hatchet and even help her out of her recent financial troubles by paying her $19,000 ... provided that she agrees to stop wearing fur and donate her unwanted furs to PETA as Mariah Carey and Kim Cattrall have done.

You can read PETA's letter to Aretha below, and, as always, those lightning-quick reporters over at TMZ are first on the scene with the full story.