Photo Op: Adidas’s New Leather Line to Draw Giant PETA ‘Ostrich’ to NYFW Launch Event
For Immediate Release:
February 9, 2025
Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382
To ruffle some feathers in defense of all animals, a group of PETA supporters accompanied by a life-size “ostrich” will gather outside Adidas’s New York Fashion Week event tomorrow to ask the brand not to take a step backward with its new A-TYPE collection, which reworks classic nylon and cotton styles into leather versions made from the sliced-off skins of tormented animals.
“No animal should be violently slaughtered and skinned for the sake of a shoe,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA is calling on Adidas to step away from leather and stick to the wonderful cruelty-free vegan materials it already offers.”
Where: Outside the Adidas launch event at Jeffrey Deitch, 18 Wooster Street, New York
When: Monday, February 10, 2:30 p.m.
Why: Every year, more than a billion animals are killed by the global leather industry. Cows and other animals who are killed for their skin endure intensive confinement, agonizing mutilations, and other extreme cruelty before they’re hauled to slaughterhouses—where some are even skinned and dismembered while they’re still conscious. In addition to the immense suffering the leather industry inflicts on animals, it’s also a major contributor to the climate catastrophe, land devastation, deforestation, pollution, water contamination, and loss of biodiversity.
Sustainable vegan leather made from apples, cork, corn, grapes, mushrooms, paper, pineapples, soy, or tea mimics the properties of leather without the cruelty to animals or environmental devastation.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.
