In a bid to lower its environmental impact, Moncler will stop using animal fur in all of its collections by 2024.
The luxury outerwear brand, whose current offerings feature both genuine and faux fur trim, will stop sourcing the animal byproduct this year. Moncler's Fall/Winter 2023 collection, slated to hit shelves in 2024, will be the last to include real fur.
One of the world's hottest fashion labels, Moncler announced the move as part of its latest release, a new collection of ready-to-wear made with eco-conscious components such as recycled nylon and down sourced from the food industry, certified by the Down Integrity System and Traceability (DIST) Protocol.
Moncler's decision to go fur-free follows in the footsteps of several major fashion players, including luxury conglomerate Kering (the group's houses include Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, and Gucci, an early adopter of the fur-free movement), online retailer MyTheresa, and department store Nordstrom.
Before high fashion went faux, online protest began driving the shift to a fur-less future. As Angela Waters wrote for Highsnobiety in 2019, viral videos of animal abuse at the hands of fur farmers have become the new (and more effective) red paint.
Social media and its proliferation of call-out culture has also driven the disreputation of animal fur. Even the queen of the internet, Kim Kardashian, declared that faux fur was her "new" thing in an Instagram post from 2018.
Fur farming is an undeniably cruel practice, but our collective shift to faux substitutes comes with its own set of issues.
For example — most faux fur is made from forms of plastic such as acrylic, modacrylic and polyester, none of which are biodegradable.
Moncler's step towards a fur-less future is commendable, certainly, and hopefully a move that won't see genuine fur replaced by plastic.
