Full-Page PETA Ad Featuring Prince Targets Designers Using Wool 

For Immediate Release:
June 7, 2021

Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382

To honor Prince’s animal-friendly legacy on the late musician’s birthday, PETA is running an ad in Women’s Wear Daily today urging fashion designers to drop wool from their lines.

The ad shows Prince in all his glory and features a quote from the liner notes of his 1999 album, Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic, for which he wore a wool-free jacket and railed against the horrors of the wool industry and its practices of castrating male lambs without painkillers, punching holes in lambs’ ears, and chopping off their tails. “Please use vegan knitwear,” the ad concludes.

“Prince knew that every wool garment represented the terror and torment of gentle sheep who are mutilated and killed, and he used his voice to push for a kinder world,” says PETA Senior Vice President Dan Mathews. “PETA is celebrating him for having a heart as big as his tremendous talent and urging people to choose cruelty-free clothing in his honor.”

Since 2014, PETA has released 14 exposés documenting cruelty to sheep at 117 wool operations on four continents. The most recent wool-industry exposé—of a shearing crew in Australia, the world’s largest exporter of wool—reveals that workers stood on a sheep’s neck, punched sheep in the face, kicked them, cut off swaths of their flesh, and left many with bleeding wounds. Data from the Higg Materials Sustainability Index show that because of the greenhouse-gas emissions created during its production, wool has a far greater impact on climate change than its vegan counterparts.

In addition to condemning wool, Prince refused to wear leather or anything else derived from animals and was an outspoken animal advocate who wanted an “Animal Rights Day when all slaughterhouses shut down.” He was named PETA’s Sexiest Vegetarian in 2006 and donated his pro-vegan song “Animal Kingdom” to PETA, which was offered as a free download after his death.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow thegroup on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.