French Luxury Brand Saint Laurent Goes Fur-Free

The end of fur at Saint Laurent. ALAIN JOCARD AFP/File
The end of fur at Saint Laurent. ALAIN JOCARD AFP/File
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French Luxury Brand Saint Laurent Goes Fur-Free

The end of fur at Saint Laurent. ALAIN JOCARD AFP/File
The end of fur at Saint Laurent. ALAIN JOCARD AFP/File

French high-end fashion brand Saint Laurent will stop using fur in its collections from next year, its parent company Kering said on Friday, joining a growing list of global companies.

Kering brand Brioni will also forsake fur, the company said, making all the fashion group's houses fur-free.

Animal rights groups have long lobbied the global fashion industry to give up fur and several, including Versace, Chanel and Michael Kors, had already stopped using it, said AFP.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) took the lead in protesting against Saint Laurent, demonstrating outside its store in the fashionable Avenue Montaigne in Paris this year after supermodel Kate Moss appeared in an advertising campaign for the brand wearing a fox coat.

"There is nothing glamorous about fur," PETA told Saint Laurent.

Within the Kering group, Gucci was the first to drop fur in 2017, followed by Balenciaga, Bottega Veneta et Alexander McQueen.

"The world has changed, along with our clients, and luxury naturally needs to adapt to that," Kering CEO François-Henri Pinault said in a statement.

Kering would be entirely fur-free from the Fall 2022 collections.

On Friday, among the fur items still available in Saint Laurent's webstore were a rabbit coat priced at 5,500 euros ($6,450), a sleeveless fox vest for the same price, and a pair of mink mules for 995 euros.

"We believe that killing animals not to eat them but only for their fur doesn't correspond to modern luxury which must be ethical, in sync with its times and the questions of our societies," Marie-Claire Daveu, head of sustainable development at Kering, told AFP.

LVMH, the world's largest luxury group and Kering rival, meanwhile told AFP that it continued to allow its brands to meet customer demand for fur products.

These were being made "in the most ethical and responsible way possible", LVMH said, adding that it had banned all fur from endangered species.

According to PETA, 85 percent of fur sold in the world originates from animals who live their entire lives in captivity, often in conditions "of misery" and "extreme suffering".

They are usually killed by poison gas, electrocution or beaten to death with clubs, it said.

The international fur trade is estimated to be worth several tens of billions of dollars annually, employing around one million people worldwide.



Zara Owner Inditex Sees Good Holiday Season after Weak Third Quarter

FILE PHOTO: People shop during the opening of a Zara store after fashion giant Inditex resumed its operations in Venezuela under a franchise agreement, in Caracas, Venezuela April 25, 2024. REUTERS/Leonardo Fernandez Viloria/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: People shop during the opening of a Zara store after fashion giant Inditex resumed its operations in Venezuela under a franchise agreement, in Caracas, Venezuela April 25, 2024. REUTERS/Leonardo Fernandez Viloria/File Photo
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Zara Owner Inditex Sees Good Holiday Season after Weak Third Quarter

FILE PHOTO: People shop during the opening of a Zara store after fashion giant Inditex resumed its operations in Venezuela under a franchise agreement, in Caracas, Venezuela April 25, 2024. REUTERS/Leonardo Fernandez Viloria/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: People shop during the opening of a Zara store after fashion giant Inditex resumed its operations in Venezuela under a franchise agreement, in Caracas, Venezuela April 25, 2024. REUTERS/Leonardo Fernandez Viloria/File Photo

Zara owner Inditex said the start of the holiday season had got off to a good start after it reported weaker than expected quarterly results as rainy weather hit some key European markets.
The company behind Zara and other brands said its sales rose a slower than expected 7% to 27.4 billion euros ($28.84 billion) during the period, below the 8% expected by analysts.
Its net profit of 4.44 billion euros for the first nine months of 2024, up 8.5% from a year earlier, was below analysts' average expectation of 4.52 billion euros.
The company however reported a better start of the holiday season, with revenues rising 9% during the six weeks to Dec. 9 as the world's biggest fast-fashion retailer kept drawing in shoppers even as rivals struggled.
Revenue growth in the period, which includes the key Black Friday sales, was slower than the 14% increase reported a year ago, though.
"We had a strong start to the last quarter against a demanding comparable in the same period of 2023," Inditex's capital market director, Marcos Lopez, told Reuters.
He stressed that in constant currency sales growth was 10.5% in the first nine months of the fiscal year and the growth in constant currency during the third quarter was the faster of the year.