Dressed the History of Fashion is a production of I Heart Radio. With over seven billion people in the world, we all have one thing in common. Every day, we all get dressed. Welcome to Dressed the History of Fashion, a podcast where we explore the who, what went, of why we wear. We are fashion historians and your hosts, Cassidy Zachary and April Callaghan cast. More than one of our listeners has written to us in the past suggesting that we invite today's guest on the show. And little did they know at the time when they wrote to us that this was already in the works and had been in already on the works for quite some time. Sure was, and today's episodes should be of great interest to all of our listeners who are animal lovers as are we, because between the two of us, April, we have three dogs and one cat. We share do and and on more than one occasion they've actually been in the room with us when we were recording, and I don't know even know how many times have we had to pause recording in order to ask them to be quiet. I've I mean, I've lost I've lost count at this point, and I'm always like yes, yes, yes, you're cute, but mama is trying to work right now, and you're being slightly annoying at the moment. And I guess I suppose that's like any other family member that we know and love, right Yeah, And I mean, our pets are so much more than just our companion animals. I mean, many of our listeners will agree with us when we say these animals are our family and it's unfathomable to imagine them as anything. But however, history tells a different story, as we know, for feathers leather have long been staples of the fashion industry. Today, we are please to welcome to the show animal rights activists and men's work designer Joshua Catcher. His book Fashion Animals explores a relationship between humans and the animals they wear. Welcome to the show, Joshua. It is a pleasure to have you here. Joshua, Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. And I'm excited because I think mostly in mainstream culture, people tend to look at fashion as something that's frivolous and silly and just about surface and vanity. And this is a place I think where fashion is taken really seriously. It's cerebral. It really highlights the intersections that fashion has with culture and politics and identity, and that is a conversation that is so important. Yeah, and I think it's I think it's something that UM. We've had so many people right to us saying like, I was never into fashion. I didn't realize all this other stuff, all these implications. So UM, you know, that's exactly why we do the show, and that's why we picked the talk but that we pick for for each episode. So UM, first off, I just want to say that your book that we're going to talk about today is exactly how you and I met. I don't even remember how many years ago. This was now, maybe four or five years ago, something like that, UM, And I remember very clearly when you came in to do a research appointment and you had on this fabulous quasi motorcycle jacket that wasn't leather, it was actually made of this really beautiful, kind of slovey tweetie text stile. And I just remember thinking, I'm not sure who this lovely human being is, but I'm pretty sure we're going to be friends, which is kind of what happened immediately after that. Yes, that jacket, I think I were it here today maybe, And it's made of all recycled fibers exactly, yes, And little did I know at that time that it was actually your design. And we are going to talk about your company, brave Gentleman, here in a little bit. But first I want to congratulate you on the publication of your book, Thank You Fashion Animals, UM. And it came out earlier this year, I think, um January nine, correct, yeah, um. And it's a really beautiful testament to your commitment to the cause of animal rights at large. And the book enlists the lens of fashion to kind of really explore the way in which humans have negotiated their relationships with and also use of animals differently throughout history. So what initially sparked the impetus to write the book. I was looking through a fashion magazine and I came across an image that ended up becoming the opening page of the book. And it was a black and white image fashion editorial. I believe the model is Constance Jablonsky, and she's on the floor and she's got some kittens crawling on her, about four or five little white kittens and she's in a fur coat, and it's lit beautifully. From an esthetic standpoint, it's a great image, and there was something about it that bothered me, and Um, I took a little while for me to deconstruct the image and understand what I knew. It was something to do with the cats and the fur coat. UM, and I think that trying to deconstruct this image and look at it from the perspective of which animals are being validated here and which animals have literally disappeared into a fashion object, they've become objectified. That question sparked the entire book to go into this deep dive of looking at the relationship that we have to animals in fashion and culture in general. So asking the question of which animals do we validate and which animals do we wear? That question really sparked the writing of the book. Yeah, and it's wonderful, I have to say. And I've read your manuscript, Um in a couple of different incarnations, and one thing that always strikes me is how Um, you have a very specific point of view, but you also have this very gentle way and how you present information that is sometimes very very difficult to hear and images that are very difficult to look at. So I want to quote you here quite early on in the book, when you say quote ultimately, I dare say that it is never how animals are used in fashion. It is a matter that they are used at all. So, um, you know, sometimes, as we all know, within fashion history, items that have been made from animals, such as you know, things using leather, things using for things using feathers, these things have really been considered the apex of the luxury pyramid, in your opinion, Historically, what has been the lure of wearing these types of materials. I think throughout history there's a very big reason for wearing animal materials early on, and that was survival and functionality. And that's in a prehistoric context. It was about survival. So are contemporary understanding of things like for and exotic skins representing luxury. I think it was really solidified in the Middle Ages, in the royal courts. If you look at a painting like Louis the fourteenth where he's in that big powder blue ermine cape, and you analyze that painting, you can look at it as this very direct symbol of royal power. This this cape is a symbol of access to arduous trade routes. It's a symbol of access to skilled laborers and craftsmen. It's a symbol of power over nature. And it was meant to be this other worldly object that the common person would not have. So the use of animals is very much about the display of power and the display of um royal power. And I think what we when we look at luxury fashion today, you can trace that lineage of that idea back and and it was enforced by laws. Yeah, um, and we have had several requests for sumptuary law episodes, so we will get to that at some point undressed. We've we've mentioned this before. UM. This this next question that I'm going to ask you is a little bit of a juggernaut. I realized it's it's a large question to throw at you. But Um, prior to the nineteenth century, what was the kind of cultural attitudes within the West Western civilization of the relationship between humans and non human animals. Our understanding of nature and animals today is extremely different than it was even even a few decades ago. I think we are now just realizing that the earth has limits that we can completely shift the planet's ability to sustain human life, to sustain a lot of planet animal life. But it wasn't until very recently that that happened. Before that the view of nature and animals was that it was an unending supply of an exhaust stable resources, and that it was placed here for us, and that if we were to take something, that it would always be replaced. And I think that that idea really permeates our view of animal materials and fashion today, that that animals are little fabric factories that just will continue to produce inexhaustibly. You talk about this idea of carnism in the book What exactly does that mean? Carnism is an ideology that was identified and named by Dr Melanie Joy, who is a psychologist, and the term carnism is uh an unveiling of an ideology about our relationship to animals. It is looking at our use of animals as a choice rather than a given. And if we look at fashion through the lens of carnism, it would sound something like this in animal wearing culture as a around the world, we don't often question why we find the skins of some animals disgusting or unacceptable, or the skins of other animals normal or beautiful, or why we wear animals at all. I think wearing animals is seen as a natural given. We don't get up in the morning and say today, I'm going to wear animals. We see that as just natural. But if we take a step back and we look at across many different cultures, will find that in certain cultures, UM wearing animals that we find unacceptable here are perfectly acceptable in other places. So we have to start asking a deeper question about this ideology right right, And in my mind it kind of feels like Carni is Umu was kind of hanging out and being friends with manifest destiny, which was basically this kind of nineteenth century American specific ideology that, like, as you said, UM humans held this god given right of dominion over the natural world and specifically UM and North America. So how did this idea of manifest destiny play out very specifically in terms of fashion. Manifest destiny in fashion, you can look at some really interesting examples, one of which is the decimation of the American bison um during this time. As as new railroads are being built UM and people were going further and further west, the trend in buffalo robes played a major and central role in the complete near extinction of the American of the buffalo and um. You can look at the numbers. They went from sixty million and eighteen hundred down to just three hundred individuals. And that was driven in large part by the financial incentives of buffalo robes, which are the skins of the buffalo being shipped very quickly on these new transportation systems right back to major city centers where the demand for this trend and was pretty huge. And it was really a travesty because they didn't even harvest the meat from the buffalo. They would skin them and leave them to rot. So imagine Old West late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds, that the landscape is just littered in buffalo carcasses, and there are these mountains of buffalo skulls everywhere in every train yard is just piles and piles of these buffalo pelts. And there were other forces that play. The government wanted to disempower the indigenous people and they were the traditional lifestyle was very reliant on on the buffalo, and so there were many imperialist and colonialist forces that played here. UM and and also too, I would say the beaver plays into this as well. Right, The very strong fashion trend is particularly in Europe for beaver skin hats. Yes, the beaver felt hat in the in the in the fifteen hundreds, the need to have a beaver felt hat, societally speaking, was very important, and everybody had one and if you were anybody who was anybody, you needed this very specific beaver felt hat. And it became such an important symbol that the beaver pelts, they were a currency, they were valuable just as much as gold, and it was the reason why explorers came to North America looking for more beaver pelts to exploit, because they had driven the European beaver to near extinction. And like the American buffalo, the European beaver and and the American buffalo never really recovered. They aren't completely extinct, but they are considered functionally extinct. Right. I think that's an important distinction to make, and we'll get into that I think a little bit more in a bit. And this wasn't just in the America's that this was happening, um, and oftentimes they were actually matters of colonialism that were at play and harvesting resources from the animal kingdom that we're going to be used in action. Can you give us a couple of point examples of this. I think there's a really striking example of this at play. And if you look at a place like New Zealand, which was a colony of England um In in the early nineteen hundreds, there was a trip that was taken by the Duke of Cornwall. He went to visit um New Zealand in I believe it was or nineteen o one, and he was given a feather as a gift, a feather from the Huia bird that's h u i a. And he was given this feather by the Maori guide marek Hetty. She was known as Maggie. And this is a symbol of friendship, a symbol of welcoming. And this hat that he was wearing. He put the feather in the hat and a photograph was taken. And it took me a really long time to find this photograph. I knew it existed, I had read about it, and I was determined to find it, and I finally, after a couple of years of searching, I found it. And it's in the It's in the book, and I just I can't tell you how excited I was when I found this image because it it really to see it as different than to just hear about it. So imagine that there's this black and white image and he's sitting he's sitting in a car, and he's got his hat on and the fat the feather is his black feather with a white a white end. It's a beautiful feather. And this photograph circulated in the newspapers back in Europe, and the demand for this feather became so great that the bird was wiped out. Within just a few years, it was gone. It's amazing, incredible, and I think you can look at that example of how celebrity culture can impact the natural world through fashion trends. That's a very early example and that still goes on. Imagine the impact that celebrities on Instagram have today when they post a photo of themselves wearing something that has real world impact. Yeah. Absolutely. And um just earlier this week it was the met Gala, and I have to say when Cardi b came out with the with the top. First of all, it was a beautiful dress. It was sculpturally but it had thirty thousand cock feathers on it, and I was just like, oh fail, It's It's something that people don't quite think about. We see these fashion objects, these items, these materials, and we see them as materials. We don't have that connection to of whom they are made. And that, I think is an essential story that needs to become part of the material story. The traditional material story starts at production, starts at the mill, and we need to take a few steps back and have a broader understanding of our definitions of beauty. I think and consider is the way that this was made beautiful and that Cardi b gown. It made me think of the extinction of the Mammo honey creeper, which was in Hawaii. This bird, it took about eighty thousand birds to make one cape, one royal cape, and it was because they only use the yellow feather and this bird only had a few yellow feathers and so within a matter of just a few years um that bird eventually went extinct as well. Yeah, so we're going to take a brief sponsor break, but when we come back, I'm gonna ask you about this who and fashion Welcome back. I'd like to fast forward us in time just a little bit about a hundred and fifty years. Because this ideology that we were talking about earlier, that we can really do no wrong to Mother Earth, that that she remains this ever replenishable basket of abundance. You know, this is this idea is very much alive and well in the American political landscape at the moment, if not around the world in certain countries. And I'm talking big picture here, not just in terms of animal conservation, but also energy resources and various other things. But there are really staggering studies that are coming out now, um Um. Some of them I think maybe have been misinterpreted a little bit in the press. Um. You know, I've read more than a few journalistic summaries of a recent World Wildlife report saying that we've killed off more than sixty of animal species in the last forty years. And this was a huge red flag for me in more than one way. Now, I know that you know more about this than I do, and it seems that some news outlets have kind of misinterpreted the nature of the complicated statistics in this report. So the situation might not actually be quite that dire. Um. But but there's still this very real need for measures of protection UM and conservation of the animal kingdom. Can you tell us a little bit about the early histories of the animal rights movements and and how did their foundation relate to the fashion traits? That is a real central focus of the book is looking at these early UM incarnations of what we now know as the contemporary animal rights movement, the contemporary conservation movement. These are founded in a fight over fashion, and I think a lot of people don't realize that specifically, what was happening to birds at the turn of the twentieth century sparked the formation of the Audubon Society, which is really the birth of modern conservation movement in UM, in Western culture, and this, this fight over what was happening to birds also resulted in what we now know as the modern animal rights movement. It raised eyebrows concerning sweatshops and and what was happening to young immigrants working in plumaries here in New York City. UM. It also was a place where Virginia Wolf was able to write this beautiful UM polemic that she used a term called sex antagonism. The term sexism didn't exist at the time, and women were being specifically accused of being the reason why all of these birds were going extinct um due to fashion, to women's vanity. So she wrote this really powerful piece and she said something like, could it be a graver sin to torture birds? Then? To be unjust two women and a lot of people during this time were very worried about what was happening to birds. They were being hunted to extinction, and not just birds. If you look back, the sea mink was hunted to extinction for their for the toola qualaby um was hunted to extinction for there for the Tasmanian tiger and the Falkland Island wolf were both driven to extinction, killed off as pests in the wool industry. Um the Great Auk was a bird that was driven to extinction for down, and the examples go on and on, the quaga, the Arabian ostrich. A lot of people don't realize how many animals have been driven to extinction because of the demands for their hairs and feathers and skins. But the birth of the animal rights movement was something that um in intersected with fashion. In this field, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds used a technique that we now consider very normal in modern day protesting, the placard standing in the street with a placard. They wanted to show people what was happening to the birds that were being hunted, and they took images and put them on boards and stood out in the street and held them up. And that was an innovative thing at the time. So this, this history of fashions impact on animals had long and far reaching impacts and consequences for activism in general, spanning many different, many different methods. Absolutely, you also speak a lot in the book about this schism that exists between people who identify as animal lovers but also where animal products. Why do you think this is such a prevalent cultural attitude. There are a few main forces at play, one of which we talked about, which is carnism, which is this ideology that most most of us live with. But in addition to that, there is something that's called esthetic irrationality. And I don't believe that most people if presented with a situation where an animal was being harmed, I don't think that they would like that or want that. I think most of us share similar values as far as we don't want to see innocent living creatures harmed. So what happens is in an industry where a lot of these practices are intentionally hidden. You'll notice that industries like the fur industry and the leather industry and even the wool industry, they don't use their production methods as a source of materials for advertage, for advertising. It's not a point of pride. They're not They're not posting videos of the slaughter process. You know. Sometimes they have these very romanticized images of before, like the animals living in a field like um, lazing about. Even the fur industry to day will try to have a few farms that they that are the very best, that are used just for press, but they will never show you the killing process. And that's the that that is what transforms the animal into the into the material. So um, this disconnect, this aesthetic rationality basically sounds like this ethical correctness rarely overcomes the perceived correctness of aesthetic beauty. We live in a culture where beauty is seen as goodness. So we have these beautiful objects, and we see beauty as good, so those objects must be good, and our desire for goodness becomes very aligned with this idea that beauty is good. But if the process is ugly, if the process is bad, how does that change our perception of the final object being beautiful. I think that's a conversation that is very important to have, and I think that it doesn't just touch on the fashion industry, touches on any visual industry where the way that something happens can be horrific, but if the final product is beautiful, we seem to be willing to disconnect, disassociate from that process. And UM. This is something that the contemporary philosopher Lars Fenson writes about extensively in his book Fashion and Philosophy, which I think is a fantastic critical analysis of UM of fashion culture. And so this this UM, this idea of aesthetic of rationality UM, it plays itself out not only in the material the garments or accessories themselves, we also see it manifesting itself in fashion advertising. And this is kind of going back to that point that we talked about at the very beginning, that image of the woman in the fur coat with the kittens, that that kind of sparked you writing the book. You know, there's so much UM fashion advertising out there. Of that nature. UM And and your research has covered so many examples of these types of advertisements, historic and also both contemporary. Can you tell us about a few examples that you found the most significant? Yeah, there is one advertisement from There's too, one of which you um you found in the special collections, which was that for catalog, the hand painted beautiful UM for catalog and I'm i'm I'm forgetting the name of it right now. It's the one with the woman with the tiger, right, is that the one that you're referring to. It's the one with the white foxes. And there's a beautiful French poem that goes with that. Is a fur catalog for the company Young Women. Yes, yes, So this catalog is hand painted beautifully. There's beautiful French poetry and on one page on the right hand side, you have the model illustrated wearing a fur garment. On the left hand side you have the animal that beau humes that garment. And the disconnect is less here because they actually show a little bit of the cruelty. Um. They show the fox in a trap and there's blood on the ground and he's sort of looking up. UM. Often too, the distance and The poem essentially suggests that until the fox becomes a garment, his life is meaningless, he has no purpose, he will know no triumphs, is what they say. And um, I think that this is a really kind of dark and troubling look at animals in general, the idea that they have no inner life, that they have no social or emotional or psychological needs or desires, and that they are um simply here wanting to become useful to human beings, and that that their lives are meaningless until they become useful to humans. So that, I think is a really powerful example. That whole catalog is like that. And then there is one advertisement from Brevet Giuseppe or just see Breve is If, an Italian furrier from the early nineteen hundreds, and there is this advertisement where a woman is emerging from the woods and she is draped in fur, and there's a an ape angling a mirror towards her, and then on the right hand side, all of these animals have emerged from the forest to present themselves to her. And the fox is carrying a dead rabbit and he's handing he's he's offering it to her, and all of these animals are are are gathering around her, and they they are telling this story that I think is really important to our our human egos, our mythology of animals, that they want so badly to become useful to human beings that if we can take them and and kill them, they're they're suicidal at this point. They want to die. They want to sacrifice themselves and become martyrs for the cause of beautifying and empowering human beings. And that I think is something that's really prevalent throughout fashion advertising that uses animals. In contemporary context, the use of animals and advertising and editorials, I think is more subtle. We know much more about animals now, and some stuff has had to change, but overall, not that much has changed. I think the presence of animals and advertising and editorials is a weird form of permission granting permission, That that because there is a live animal alongside a product made from a dead animal, that that animal is somehow granting permission for use and um, and that I find to be especially manipulative. We're gonna take a short sponsor break um from that little bit of a grim moment um. But when we come back we're going to turn our attention to the future of fashion. Welcome back, Joshua. It really struck me when you write in the book quote when considering how fashion reshapes ecological landscapes, we must see fashion not as an isolated genre, but as one manifestation of industrial civilization. Can you expound on this idea a little bit for us. Absolutely, if we look at industrial civilization as a singular thing that is happening, that civilization itself is a choice. We've all we're all participating in this civilization project. We're not living outside of the context of civilization. Here talking on microphones, and you know in a studio there are there are human beings that do live outside of the context of industrial civilization, and I'm not talking about them, But for the billions of people who are living in this context of industrial civilization, there are many manifestations of our political goal and economic and social activities, and fashion itself is one manifestation of that civilization project. And as technologies and developments increase in production capabilities and access to resources and impacts, the way that fashion operates is also affected by that and and is able to benefit from that From an economic standpoint. If we look at fast fashion today, that is a direct result of the overall advancements in scalability, in production technology, in UM engineering, transportation. Yes, and in regards to fashion being a manifestation of industrial civilization, we could really look at fashion as being only limited by our technological and industrial abilities to extract, confine, kill, or otherwise process animals into products and materials, and as the technologies and systems within civilization advance and enable us to scale up all of those things more and more. The fashion industry benefits from that from a financial standpoint, and and you can see the parallels of how that industry and every other industry have similar, similar impacts. So yeah, and when it comes to farming, um, can you tell us some of the surprising side effects to the environment that we're starting to see happening, Because you were the one that opened my eyes to this and I was like, wait, what, Yeah, it's livestock production talking about cows and sheep. Those are two huge livestock sectors. The impact of raising animals for food and materials is staggering. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization likes to remind us every few years that Livestock industries have the single greatest cause of the worst environmental problems. When you think about the quantity of animals that are here. There are one billion sheep on the planet. There are a billion animals a year killed for the leather industry. Raising those animals requires clear the clear cutting of rainforests requires enormous amounts of resources and water and land, and the impact from every one of those animals as a little methane factory, and methane has twenty times the global warming potential as carbon. So if you look at a place like New Zealand or Australia that have huge wool industry, those sheep are the top contributor to greenhouse gases in certain places, and as well as loss of biodiversity due to the clearing of forests like for cattle in South America. UM and these farming practices. When we when we get that final fiber, yeah, it's quote unquote natural, it's about degradable, it's a protein fiber. But if we don't consider where that fiber was grown, on whom that fiber was grown, that is a very very small sliver of the full of the big picture. So we can't really look at things like wool as a quote unquote sustainable material, um it presents a much more complicated and nuanced case. Do you want to expound upon some of the aspects of the wool industry that that are problematic? This? Yeah, and this might be difficult for some people to hear because we like to think of our fantasies that are often plastered on the sides of dairy trucks when they go by, like the cows just lazing about a beautiful green field, and the same thing with the wool industry. Most people in their mind think that wool is just a friendly haircut. But the industrial wool industry at scale, those billion sheep, this is an industry that pays shearers bya not by hour, so there is an incentive to be quick. And those clippers are dangerous. They're sharp. And imagine that you are a shearer and your day in and day out job is to share as many sheep as quickly as you can. These are prey animals. They don't like to be pinned down, they don't like to be held down, so they're fighting, they're struggling, and eventually you're gonna lose your temper. If you're one of these shearers, and what's happened in over one hundred investigations. There have been over a hundred undercover investigations into shearing facilities throughout the world, in the United States, in Australia, in South America, and what they've discovered is that sheep are being beaten. There, being slammed to the ground, They're having their bones broken, they're being lacerated by the shears, They're having their ears clipped off, genitals clipped off. It's horrific. And I'm not talking about somebody who has a couple of sheep in their backyard and once a year they make themselves a sweater. I'm talking about the industry at scale. And whenever we're talking about animal cruelty within fashion, it's it's the cruelty is always happening in parallel with the scale. The larger the scale, the more cruelty exists, right, right. And of course, like just this idea of the clippers that they're using our shears, they're they're electric or battery powered, right, because that's not the traditional method of combing sheep, right, didn't they use brushes? And historically in the past, well, firstly, I'll say that sheep naturally in nature, sheep shed, right, but we've bred them to not shed. I mean, think about that for a minute. We've we've intentionally genetically manipulated sheep so that in the hob in the hotter weather, they can't shed themselves because you're losing valuable resources. It's money, right. So if you look at that from that perspective of how do we manipulate nature and animals to meet economic desires? That the domestication of sheep is one where, especially today, when you have things like a practice like mule sing, where they've bread sheep to have too much skin, and because they've bread cheep to have too much skin, which benefits their their wallets, they end up with these folds, and in the folds they get infested. So they've come up with a way to cut off their rear ends the skin. They just cut off the skin around their rear ends and it's they do it without anesthetics, and it's incredibly painful. And this is to prevent something called fly strike. And that's just a product of the desire for more and more and more wool. Yeah, heart wrenching. So let's talk about some of the solutions to these issues if we may, Because of course, you are yourself a designer, what do you think the most critical issues facing the fashion industry are today? I think the most critical issues facing the fashion industry today are circularity and sustainability. I think that you can look at animal cruelty within the context of sustainability. Some people define sustainability outside of that context, but I think it's an essential aspect. I think ethics, the way that we treat animals, the way that we treat people working in the fashion industry, these are all inherently part of a sustainable fashion model. How do we keep seven billion people clothed? That is a huge crisis. And we know the impacts of conventional cotton. We know the impact of the leather industry. Now we know the impacts of the wool industry. We know what's happening with synthetics and plastics. Every material that we're producing at scale has impacts. So scale is a huge problem. Is a problem, and it it starts to get into that territory where people don't like to get too comfortable saying like, oh, there's too many people, But um, we have solutions and we can clothe seven billion people, and we can do it ethically and sustainably. And we are on the verge of the most exciting innovations in material technology. And I think that if we'd only put more resources and incentives and training into this field, into this burgeoning field, not only would it solve a lot of issues of sustainability and ethics, but imagine a designer being able to work with materials that are infinitely customizable, that are able to do things that no materials today can do. That I think is the most exciting aspect of this That this this massive problem that we hopefully can overcome, won't just be solved for the pure need of solving it, but it will be solved in a way that makes design more beautiful. It's a win win. And you are tackling head on these issues in your own brand. Can you tell us a little bit about the platform of your men's wear line? Brave Gentleman. Absolutely. Brave Gentleman started in two thousand ten. It emerged from a blog that I was writing called The Discerning Brute, where I was talking about men's where ethical men'shear vegan men's wear from um from this standpoint of masculine fashion and at the time in two thousand and eight when I started it, no one was really talking about it. When we heard about eco fashion, it was much more geared towards a fem audience. And I think that today we've seen a lot of strides made in UM. I mean, this is a whole other episode masculinity, masculinity and sustainability. Yeah, we could really get in deep with our our fragile masculine ideas of how we have to be brutal. But um I digress. So Brave Gentleman started in two thousand ten, and it's really it's become a proof of concept. I think I wanted to make things that I personally wanted that I didn't that didn't exist. I wanted really nice dress shoes that were classic and that didn't harm, didn't require the killing of an animal, and I wanted really fine tailored suiting that didn't require the sharing of a sheep. And up until I think my brand started, the perception of these quote unquote alternative materials was that they are cheap, and they are ugly, and they are uncomfortable. And I have been striving to find the most beautiful and luxurious and tactile materials to work with in Brave Gentleman, and I'm continually expanding upon the library of materials that I draw from. There are so many things I wish I could work with today that are not yet commercially available. Whether that is my silium leather being made from mushrooms, or the biosilk that's being synthesized um which is biologically identical to spider silk, or whether it's lab grown leather. It's coming soon, coming, all of these things. I mean, imagine there is a company Furroid that it's a biotech company that started up in Europe. They're growing pelts in the laboratory, like we imagine you're a designer and you want to have a customized pelt grown as the hair as long as you want, any color, you want, the skin as thick as you want, and no living animal is attached to it that I think, And it doesn't require a forest is cleared to let this animal greeze, and it doesn't require the the paradox of having to do something that is quite ugly to make something quite beautiful. Yeah, yeah, I was really impressed when I was in Australia recently. There's a sneaker company that's using the apple leather and the pineapple leather, and their shoes are super cute and I didn't have room from them in my bag, but I am following them on Instagram, and as soon as they start shipping to the US, I'm getting those like gold sneakers and apple leather and just so beautiful. The materials that we have the potential to use that are made from waste, that are made from everything from recycled fishing nets, like Eco nil is met is pulling fishing nets. People don't realize that the top contributor to ocean plastic pollution. It's not straws, it's not coffee lids, it's fishing nets. It's abandoned fishing nets. And so this company, Eco nil is taking all the fishing nets out of the ocean and recycling them into infinitely recyclable nylon. And it's that's circularity that we're looking for. So um there are companies that are coming up with all sorts of really visionary innovations. We are entering the next industrial revolution, I believe, and it's going to be all about biological materials, biosynthesis, biofabrication, and it's going to be about high tech recycling, and it's going to be about plant based organics. These mushroom leathers on these pineapple fibers and orange fiber. Have you seen this orange fiber? So the company in Italy is turning the waist of citrus peels into a cashmere like fiber. What it's really cool. Yeah, we could not agree more Joshua about how cool some of these new emerging textile products are. April and I both tumble down the rabbit hole a bit researching this orange fiber, and that's actually the name of the company, Orange Fiber. They are based in Italy and are using the waste by products from the juice industry, of all places, to create a citrus based cellulose fiber, which debuted on the market in two thousand fourteen. So cool, and since then it has been embraced by fashion brands, including Fergamo, who was the very first major fashion brand to use the fiber. And get this cast. Even H and M is using orange fiber now I know. For the last few years, H and M has been creating a smaller conscious collection which uses sustainable fibers like tens l lio cell and in their most recent Conscious Exclusive twenty nine team collection, Orange Fiber. Many of you wrote test last season following our Fashion and Sustainability episode, asking how to buy sustainably while on a budget. And while April and I certainly do not endorse fast fashion due to its obvious effect on the planet, we have to give H and M a nod for their efforts to begin to use sustainable materials. Although they do have a long way to go, this is certainly a step in the right direction. Yeah, I mean only if all of their um offering sustainable and also animal free. So a huge thank you to my friend, the ever amazing Joshua Catcher for joining us to talk about his book Fashion Animals, which is of course available on Amazon. Yes, thank you, Joshua, April. It is so clear how committed he is to the cause of animal rights, not only in his writing but his everyday life. I mean, Brave Gentleman is an entirely vegan brand, so no animal materials are used and its focus is also on sustainability. And as if that's not enough, he's also a vegan cheesemonger. He had me over a while back to prove that vegan cheeses are just as delicious as traditional cheeses, and he was right, you just kind of have to know what you're buying. So I stand corrected. Um. And since then, he's par laid his fashion for vegan cheese into a new venture called Rind and you can learn more about Rind at rind dot com. Okay, now I'm hungry, although I actually have never tried a vegan cheese, I'll have to check it out. That does it for Rest Today, Dress listeners, may you ponder the weighty issue of animals and fashion the next time you get dressed. Remember to tune in this Thursday for the latest edition of Fashion History Mystery, where we address questions from you are listeners. We love hearing from you, so if you like to email us, please do so Addressed at iHeart media dot com. You can also direct messages on Instagram at Dressed Underscore Podcast, where you will find image is accompanying each week's episode at Dressed Underscore Podcast is also our Twitter handle, and you can follow us on Facebook at Dressed Podcast without the underscore. For additional readings for each week's episode, check out our show notes at dress podcast dot com. And don't forget about our merch store at t public dot com Forward slash Dress. That's t e public dot com Forward slash Dress, and it's always special. Thanks to our producers Ksey Pigraham, Holly Fry, and everyone else at I heart Radio who makes this show possible each and every week. Just the History of Fashion is a production of I heart Radio from our podcast from my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else do you listen to your favorite shows.

Dressed the History of Fashion is a production of I Heart Radio. With over seven billion people in the world, we all have one thing in common. Every day, we all get dressed. Welcome to Dressed the History of Fashion, a podcast where we explore the who, what went, of why we wear. We are fashion historians and your hosts, Cassidy Zachary and April Callaghan cast. More than one of our listeners has written to us in the past suggesting that we invite today's guest on the show. And little did they know at the time when they wrote to us that this was already in the works and had been in already on the works for quite some time. Sure was, and today's episodes should be of great interest to all of our listeners who are animal lovers as are we, because between the two of us, April, we have three dogs and one cat. We share do and and on more than one occasion they've actually been in the room with us when we were recording, and I don't know even know how many times have we had to pause recording in order to ask them to be quiet. I've I mean, I've lost I've lost count at this point, and I'm always like yes, yes, yes, you're cute, but mama is trying to work right now, and you're being slightly annoying at the moment. And I guess I suppose that's like any other family member that we know and love, right Yeah, And I mean, our pets are so much more than just our companion animals. I mean, many of our listeners will agree with us when we say these animals are our family and it's unfathomable to imagine them as anything. But however, history tells a different story, as we know, for feathers leather have long been staples of the fashion industry. Today, we are please to welcome to the show animal rights activists and men's work designer Joshua Catcher. His book Fashion Animals explores a relationship between humans and the animals they wear. Welcome to the show, Joshua. It is a pleasure to have you here. Joshua, Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. And I'm excited because I think mostly in mainstream culture, people tend to look at fashion as something that's frivolous and silly and just about surface and vanity. And this is a place I think where fashion is taken really seriously. It's cerebral. It really highlights the intersections that fashion has with culture and politics and identity, and that is a conversation that is so important. Yeah, and I think it's I think it's something that UM. We've had so many people right to us saying like, I was never into fashion. I didn't realize all this other stuff, all these implications. So UM, you know, that's exactly why we do the show, and that's why we picked the talk but that we pick for for each episode. So UM, first off, I just want to say that your book that we're going to talk about today is exactly how you and I met. I don't even remember how many years ago. This was now, maybe four or five years ago, something like that, UM, And I remember very clearly when you came in to do a research appointment and you had on this fabulous quasi motorcycle jacket that wasn't leather, it was actually made of this really beautiful, kind of slovey tweetie text stile. And I just remember thinking, I'm not sure who this lovely human being is, but I'm pretty sure we're going to be friends, which is kind of what happened immediately after that. Yes, that jacket, I think I were it here today maybe, And it's made of all recycled fibers exactly, yes, And little did I know at that time that it was actually your design. And we are going to talk about your company, brave Gentleman, here in a little bit. But first I want to congratulate you on the publication of your book, Thank You Fashion Animals, UM. And it came out earlier this year, I think, um January nine, correct, yeah, um. And it's a really beautiful testament to your commitment to the cause of animal rights at large. And the book enlists the lens of fashion to kind of really explore the way in which humans have negotiated their relationships with and also use of animals differently throughout history. So what initially sparked the impetus to write the book. I was looking through a fashion magazine and I came across an image that ended up becoming the opening page of the book. And it was a black and white image fashion editorial. I believe the model is Constance Jablonsky, and she's on the floor and she's got some kittens crawling on her, about four or five little white kittens and she's in a fur coat, and it's lit beautifully. From an esthetic standpoint, it's a great image, and there was something about it that bothered me, and Um, I took a little while for me to deconstruct the image and understand what I knew. It was something to do with the cats and the fur coat. UM, and I think that trying to deconstruct this image and look at it from the perspective of which animals are being validated here and which animals have literally disappeared into a fashion object, they've become objectified. That question sparked the entire book to go into this deep dive of looking at the relationship that we have to animals in fashion and culture in general. So asking the question of which animals do we validate and which animals do we wear? That question really sparked the writing of the book. Yeah, and it's wonderful, I have to say. And I've read your manuscript, Um in a couple of different incarnations, and one thing that always strikes me is how Um, you have a very specific point of view, but you also have this very gentle way and how you present information that is sometimes very very difficult to hear and images that are very difficult to look at. So I want to quote you here quite early on in the book, when you say quote ultimately, I dare say that it is never how animals are used in fashion. It is a matter that they are used at all. So, um, you know, sometimes, as we all know, within fashion history, items that have been made from animals, such as you know, things using leather, things using for things using feathers, these things have really been considered the apex of the luxury pyramid, in your opinion, Historically, what has been the lure of wearing these types of materials. I think throughout history there's a very big reason for wearing animal materials early on, and that was survival and functionality. And that's in a prehistoric context. It was about survival. So are contemporary understanding of things like for and exotic skins representing luxury. I think it was really solidified in the Middle Ages, in the royal courts. If you look at a painting like Louis the fourteenth where he's in that big powder blue ermine cape, and you analyze that painting, you can look at it as this very direct symbol of royal power. This this cape is a symbol of access to arduous trade routes. It's a symbol of access to skilled laborers and craftsmen. It's a symbol of power over nature. And it was meant to be this other worldly object that the common person would not have. So the use of animals is very much about the display of power and the display of um royal power. And I think what we when we look at luxury fashion today, you can trace that lineage of that idea back and and it was enforced by laws. Yeah, um, and we have had several requests for sumptuary law episodes, so we will get to that at some point undressed. We've we've mentioned this before. UM. This this next question that I'm going to ask you is a little bit of a juggernaut. I realized it's it's a large question to throw at you. But Um, prior to the nineteenth century, what was the kind of cultural attitudes within the West Western civilization of the relationship between humans and non human animals. Our understanding of nature and animals today is extremely different than it was even even a few decades ago. I think we are now just realizing that the earth has limits that we can completely shift the planet's ability to sustain human life, to sustain a lot of planet animal life. But it wasn't until very recently that that happened. Before that the view of nature and animals was that it was an unending supply of an exhaust stable resources, and that it was placed here for us, and that if we were to take something, that it would always be replaced. And I think that that idea really permeates our view of animal materials and fashion today, that that animals are little fabric factories that just will continue to produce inexhaustibly. You talk about this idea of carnism in the book What exactly does that mean? Carnism is an ideology that was identified and named by Dr Melanie Joy, who is a psychologist, and the term carnism is uh an unveiling of an ideology about our relationship to animals. It is looking at our use of animals as a choice rather than a given. And if we look at fashion through the lens of carnism, it would sound something like this in animal wearing culture as a around the world, we don't often question why we find the skins of some animals disgusting or unacceptable, or the skins of other animals normal or beautiful, or why we wear animals at all. I think wearing animals is seen as a natural given. We don't get up in the morning and say today, I'm going to wear animals. We see that as just natural. But if we take a step back and we look at across many different cultures, will find that in certain cultures, UM wearing animals that we find unacceptable here are perfectly acceptable in other places. So we have to start asking a deeper question about this ideology right right, And in my mind it kind of feels like Carni is Umu was kind of hanging out and being friends with manifest destiny, which was basically this kind of nineteenth century American specific ideology that, like, as you said, UM humans held this god given right of dominion over the natural world and specifically UM and North America. So how did this idea of manifest destiny play out very specifically in terms of fashion. Manifest destiny in fashion, you can look at some really interesting examples, one of which is the decimation of the American bison um during this time. As as new railroads are being built UM and people were going further and further west, the trend in buffalo robes played a major and central role in the complete near extinction of the American of the buffalo and um. You can look at the numbers. They went from sixty million and eighteen hundred down to just three hundred individuals. And that was driven in large part by the financial incentives of buffalo robes, which are the skins of the buffalo being shipped very quickly on these new transportation systems right back to major city centers where the demand for this trend and was pretty huge. And it was really a travesty because they didn't even harvest the meat from the buffalo. They would skin them and leave them to rot. So imagine Old West late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds, that the landscape is just littered in buffalo carcasses, and there are these mountains of buffalo skulls everywhere in every train yard is just piles and piles of these buffalo pelts. And there were other forces that play. The government wanted to disempower the indigenous people and they were the traditional lifestyle was very reliant on on the buffalo, and so there were many imperialist and colonialist forces that played here. UM and and also too, I would say the beaver plays into this as well. Right, The very strong fashion trend is particularly in Europe for beaver skin hats. Yes, the beaver felt hat in the in the in the fifteen hundreds, the need to have a beaver felt hat, societally speaking, was very important, and everybody had one and if you were anybody who was anybody, you needed this very specific beaver felt hat. And it became such an important symbol that the beaver pelts, they were a currency, they were valuable just as much as gold, and it was the reason why explorers came to North America looking for more beaver pelts to exploit, because they had driven the European beaver to near extinction. And like the American buffalo, the European beaver and and the American buffalo never really recovered. They aren't completely extinct, but they are considered functionally extinct. Right. I think that's an important distinction to make, and we'll get into that I think a little bit more in a bit. And this wasn't just in the America's that this was happening, um, and oftentimes they were actually matters of colonialism that were at play and harvesting resources from the animal kingdom that we're going to be used in action. Can you give us a couple of point examples of this. I think there's a really striking example of this at play. And if you look at a place like New Zealand, which was a colony of England um In in the early nineteen hundreds, there was a trip that was taken by the Duke of Cornwall. He went to visit um New Zealand in I believe it was or nineteen o one, and he was given a feather as a gift, a feather from the Huia bird that's h u i a. And he was given this feather by the Maori guide marek Hetty. She was known as Maggie. And this is a symbol of friendship, a symbol of welcoming. And this hat that he was wearing. He put the feather in the hat and a photograph was taken. And it took me a really long time to find this photograph. I knew it existed, I had read about it, and I was determined to find it, and I finally, after a couple of years of searching, I found it. And it's in the It's in the book, and I just I can't tell you how excited I was when I found this image because it it really to see it as different than to just hear about it. So imagine that there's this black and white image and he's sitting he's sitting in a car, and he's got his hat on and the fat the feather is his black feather with a white a white end. It's a beautiful feather. And this photograph circulated in the newspapers back in Europe, and the demand for this feather became so great that the bird was wiped out. Within just a few years, it was gone. It's amazing, incredible, and I think you can look at that example of how celebrity culture can impact the natural world through fashion trends. That's a very early example and that still goes on. Imagine the impact that celebrities on Instagram have today when they post a photo of themselves wearing something that has real world impact. Yeah. Absolutely. And um just earlier this week it was the met Gala, and I have to say when Cardi b came out with the with the top. First of all, it was a beautiful dress. It was sculpturally but it had thirty thousand cock feathers on it, and I was just like, oh fail, It's It's something that people don't quite think about. We see these fashion objects, these items, these materials, and we see them as materials. We don't have that connection to of whom they are made. And that, I think is an essential story that needs to become part of the material story. The traditional material story starts at production, starts at the mill, and we need to take a few steps back and have a broader understanding of our definitions of beauty. I think and consider is the way that this was made beautiful and that Cardi b gown. It made me think of the extinction of the Mammo honey creeper, which was in Hawaii. This bird, it took about eighty thousand birds to make one cape, one royal cape, and it was because they only use the yellow feather and this bird only had a few yellow feathers and so within a matter of just a few years um that bird eventually went extinct as well. Yeah, so we're going to take a brief sponsor break, but when we come back, I'm gonna ask you about this who and fashion Welcome back. I'd like to fast forward us in time just a little bit about a hundred and fifty years. Because this ideology that we were talking about earlier, that we can really do no wrong to Mother Earth, that that she remains this ever replenishable basket of abundance. You know, this is this idea is very much alive and well in the American political landscape at the moment, if not around the world in certain countries. And I'm talking big picture here, not just in terms of animal conservation, but also energy resources and various other things. But there are really staggering studies that are coming out now, um Um. Some of them I think maybe have been misinterpreted a little bit in the press. Um. You know, I've read more than a few journalistic summaries of a recent World Wildlife report saying that we've killed off more than sixty of animal species in the last forty years. And this was a huge red flag for me in more than one way. Now, I know that you know more about this than I do, and it seems that some news outlets have kind of misinterpreted the nature of the complicated statistics in this report. So the situation might not actually be quite that dire. Um. But but there's still this very real need for measures of protection UM and conservation of the animal kingdom. Can you tell us a little bit about the early histories of the animal rights movements and and how did their foundation relate to the fashion traits? That is a real central focus of the book is looking at these early UM incarnations of what we now know as the contemporary animal rights movement, the contemporary conservation movement. These are founded in a fight over fashion, and I think a lot of people don't realize that specifically, what was happening to birds at the turn of the twentieth century sparked the formation of the Audubon Society, which is really the birth of modern conservation movement in UM, in Western culture, and this, this fight over what was happening to birds also resulted in what we now know as the modern animal rights movement. It raised eyebrows concerning sweatshops and and what was happening to young immigrants working in plumaries here in New York City. UM. It also was a place where Virginia Wolf was able to write this beautiful UM polemic that she used a term called sex antagonism. The term sexism didn't exist at the time, and women were being specifically accused of being the reason why all of these birds were going extinct um due to fashion, to women's vanity. So she wrote this really powerful piece and she said something like, could it be a graver sin to torture birds? Then? To be unjust two women and a lot of people during this time were very worried about what was happening to birds. They were being hunted to extinction, and not just birds. If you look back, the sea mink was hunted to extinction for their for the toola qualaby um was hunted to extinction for there for the Tasmanian tiger and the Falkland Island wolf were both driven to extinction, killed off as pests in the wool industry. Um the Great Auk was a bird that was driven to extinction for down, and the examples go on and on, the quaga, the Arabian ostrich. A lot of people don't realize how many animals have been driven to extinction because of the demands for their hairs and feathers and skins. But the birth of the animal rights movement was something that um in intersected with fashion. In this field, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds used a technique that we now consider very normal in modern day protesting, the placard standing in the street with a placard. They wanted to show people what was happening to the birds that were being hunted, and they took images and put them on boards and stood out in the street and held them up. And that was an innovative thing at the time. So this, this history of fashions impact on animals had long and far reaching impacts and consequences for activism in general, spanning many different, many different methods. Absolutely, you also speak a lot in the book about this schism that exists between people who identify as animal lovers but also where animal products. Why do you think this is such a prevalent cultural attitude. There are a few main forces at play, one of which we talked about, which is carnism, which is this ideology that most most of us live with. But in addition to that, there is something that's called esthetic irrationality. And I don't believe that most people if presented with a situation where an animal was being harmed, I don't think that they would like that or want that. I think most of us share similar values as far as we don't want to see innocent living creatures harmed. So what happens is in an industry where a lot of these practices are intentionally hidden. You'll notice that industries like the fur industry and the leather industry and even the wool industry, they don't use their production methods as a source of materials for advertage, for advertising. It's not a point of pride. They're not They're not posting videos of the slaughter process. You know. Sometimes they have these very romanticized images of before, like the animals living in a field like um, lazing about. Even the fur industry to day will try to have a few farms that they that are the very best, that are used just for press, but they will never show you the killing process. And that's the that that is what transforms the animal into the into the material. So um, this disconnect, this aesthetic rationality basically sounds like this ethical correctness rarely overcomes the perceived correctness of aesthetic beauty. We live in a culture where beauty is seen as goodness. So we have these beautiful objects, and we see beauty as good, so those objects must be good, and our desire for goodness becomes very aligned with this idea that beauty is good. But if the process is ugly, if the process is bad, how does that change our perception of the final object being beautiful. I think that's a conversation that is very important to have, and I think that it doesn't just touch on the fashion industry, touches on any visual industry where the way that something happens can be horrific, but if the final product is beautiful, we seem to be willing to disconnect, disassociate from that process. And UM. This is something that the contemporary philosopher Lars Fenson writes about extensively in his book Fashion and Philosophy, which I think is a fantastic critical analysis of UM of fashion culture. And so this this UM, this idea of aesthetic of rationality UM, it plays itself out not only in the material the garments or accessories themselves, we also see it manifesting itself in fashion advertising. And this is kind of going back to that point that we talked about at the very beginning, that image of the woman in the fur coat with the kittens, that that kind of sparked you writing the book. You know, there's so much UM fashion advertising out there. Of that nature. UM And and your research has covered so many examples of these types of advertisements, historic and also both contemporary. Can you tell us about a few examples that you found the most significant? Yeah, there is one advertisement from There's too, one of which you um you found in the special collections, which was that for catalog, the hand painted beautiful UM for catalog and I'm i'm I'm forgetting the name of it right now. It's the one with the woman with the tiger, right, is that the one that you're referring to. It's the one with the white foxes. And there's a beautiful French poem that goes with that. Is a fur catalog for the company Young Women. Yes, yes, So this catalog is hand painted beautifully. There's beautiful French poetry and on one page on the right hand side, you have the model illustrated wearing a fur garment. On the left hand side you have the animal that beau humes that garment. And the disconnect is less here because they actually show a little bit of the cruelty. Um. They show the fox in a trap and there's blood on the ground and he's sort of looking up. UM. Often too, the distance and The poem essentially suggests that until the fox becomes a garment, his life is meaningless, he has no purpose, he will know no triumphs, is what they say. And um, I think that this is a really kind of dark and troubling look at animals in general, the idea that they have no inner life, that they have no social or emotional or psychological needs or desires, and that they are um simply here wanting to become useful to human beings, and that that their lives are meaningless until they become useful to humans. So that, I think is a really powerful example. That whole catalog is like that. And then there is one advertisement from Brevet Giuseppe or just see Breve is If, an Italian furrier from the early nineteen hundreds, and there is this advertisement where a woman is emerging from the woods and she is draped in fur, and there's a an ape angling a mirror towards her, and then on the right hand side, all of these animals have emerged from the forest to present themselves to her. And the fox is carrying a dead rabbit and he's handing he's he's offering it to her, and all of these animals are are are gathering around her, and they they are telling this story that I think is really important to our our human egos, our mythology of animals, that they want so badly to become useful to human beings that if we can take them and and kill them, they're they're suicidal at this point. They want to die. They want to sacrifice themselves and become martyrs for the cause of beautifying and empowering human beings. And that I think is something that's really prevalent throughout fashion advertising that uses animals. In contemporary context, the use of animals and advertising and editorials, I think is more subtle. We know much more about animals now, and some stuff has had to change, but overall, not that much has changed. I think the presence of animals and advertising and editorials is a weird form of permission granting permission, That that because there is a live animal alongside a product made from a dead animal, that that animal is somehow granting permission for use and um, and that I find to be especially manipulative. We're gonna take a short sponsor break um from that little bit of a grim moment um. But when we come back we're going to turn our attention to the future of fashion. Welcome back, Joshua. It really struck me when you write in the book quote when considering how fashion reshapes ecological landscapes, we must see fashion not as an isolated genre, but as one manifestation of industrial civilization. Can you expound on this idea a little bit for us. Absolutely, if we look at industrial civilization as a singular thing that is happening, that civilization itself is a choice. We've all we're all participating in this civilization project. We're not living outside of the context of civilization. Here talking on microphones, and you know in a studio there are there are human beings that do live outside of the context of industrial civilization, and I'm not talking about them, But for the billions of people who are living in this context of industrial civilization, there are many manifestations of our political goal and economic and social activities, and fashion itself is one manifestation of that civilization project. And as technologies and developments increase in production capabilities and access to resources and impacts, the way that fashion operates is also affected by that and and is able to benefit from that From an economic standpoint. If we look at fast fashion today, that is a direct result of the overall advancements in scalability, in production technology, in UM engineering, transportation. Yes, and in regards to fashion being a manifestation of industrial civilization, we could really look at fashion as being only limited by our technological and industrial abilities to extract, confine, kill, or otherwise process animals into products and materials, and as the technologies and systems within civilization advance and enable us to scale up all of those things more and more. The fashion industry benefits from that from a financial standpoint, and and you can see the parallels of how that industry and every other industry have similar, similar impacts. So yeah, and when it comes to farming, um, can you tell us some of the surprising side effects to the environment that we're starting to see happening, Because you were the one that opened my eyes to this and I was like, wait, what, Yeah, it's livestock production talking about cows and sheep. Those are two huge livestock sectors. The impact of raising animals for food and materials is staggering. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization likes to remind us every few years that Livestock industries have the single greatest cause of the worst environmental problems. When you think about the quantity of animals that are here. There are one billion sheep on the planet. There are a billion animals a year killed for the leather industry. Raising those animals requires clear the clear cutting of rainforests requires enormous amounts of resources and water and land, and the impact from every one of those animals as a little methane factory, and methane has twenty times the global warming potential as carbon. So if you look at a place like New Zealand or Australia that have huge wool industry, those sheep are the top contributor to greenhouse gases in certain places, and as well as loss of biodiversity due to the clearing of forests like for cattle in South America. UM and these farming practices. When we when we get that final fiber, yeah, it's quote unquote natural, it's about degradable, it's a protein fiber. But if we don't consider where that fiber was grown, on whom that fiber was grown, that is a very very small sliver of the full of the big picture. So we can't really look at things like wool as a quote unquote sustainable material, um it presents a much more complicated and nuanced case. Do you want to expound upon some of the aspects of the wool industry that that are problematic? This? Yeah, and this might be difficult for some people to hear because we like to think of our fantasies that are often plastered on the sides of dairy trucks when they go by, like the cows just lazing about a beautiful green field, and the same thing with the wool industry. Most people in their mind think that wool is just a friendly haircut. But the industrial wool industry at scale, those billion sheep, this is an industry that pays shearers bya not by hour, so there is an incentive to be quick. And those clippers are dangerous. They're sharp. And imagine that you are a shearer and your day in and day out job is to share as many sheep as quickly as you can. These are prey animals. They don't like to be pinned down, they don't like to be held down, so they're fighting, they're struggling, and eventually you're gonna lose your temper. If you're one of these shearers, and what's happened in over one hundred investigations. There have been over a hundred undercover investigations into shearing facilities throughout the world, in the United States, in Australia, in South America, and what they've discovered is that sheep are being beaten. There, being slammed to the ground, They're having their bones broken, they're being lacerated by the shears, They're having their ears clipped off, genitals clipped off. It's horrific. And I'm not talking about somebody who has a couple of sheep in their backyard and once a year they make themselves a sweater. I'm talking about the industry at scale. And whenever we're talking about animal cruelty within fashion, it's it's the cruelty is always happening in parallel with the scale. The larger the scale, the more cruelty exists, right, right. And of course, like just this idea of the clippers that they're using our shears, they're they're electric or battery powered, right, because that's not the traditional method of combing sheep, right, didn't they use brushes? And historically in the past, well, firstly, I'll say that sheep naturally in nature, sheep shed, right, but we've bred them to not shed. I mean, think about that for a minute. We've we've intentionally genetically manipulated sheep so that in the hob in the hotter weather, they can't shed themselves because you're losing valuable resources. It's money, right. So if you look at that from that perspective of how do we manipulate nature and animals to meet economic desires? That the domestication of sheep is one where, especially today, when you have things like a practice like mule sing, where they've bread sheep to have too much skin, and because they've bread cheep to have too much skin, which benefits their their wallets, they end up with these folds, and in the folds they get infested. So they've come up with a way to cut off their rear ends the skin. They just cut off the skin around their rear ends and it's they do it without anesthetics, and it's incredibly painful. And this is to prevent something called fly strike. And that's just a product of the desire for more and more and more wool. Yeah, heart wrenching. So let's talk about some of the solutions to these issues if we may, Because of course, you are yourself a designer, what do you think the most critical issues facing the fashion industry are today? I think the most critical issues facing the fashion industry today are circularity and sustainability. I think that you can look at animal cruelty within the context of sustainability. Some people define sustainability outside of that context, but I think it's an essential aspect. I think ethics, the way that we treat animals, the way that we treat people working in the fashion industry, these are all inherently part of a sustainable fashion model. How do we keep seven billion people clothed? That is a huge crisis. And we know the impacts of conventional cotton. We know the impact of the leather industry. Now we know the impacts of the wool industry. We know what's happening with synthetics and plastics. Every material that we're producing at scale has impacts. So scale is a huge problem. Is a problem, and it it starts to get into that territory where people don't like to get too comfortable saying like, oh, there's too many people, But um, we have solutions and we can clothe seven billion people, and we can do it ethically and sustainably. And we are on the verge of the most exciting innovations in material technology. And I think that if we'd only put more resources and incentives and training into this field, into this burgeoning field, not only would it solve a lot of issues of sustainability and ethics, but imagine a designer being able to work with materials that are infinitely customizable, that are able to do things that no materials today can do. That I think is the most exciting aspect of this That this this massive problem that we hopefully can overcome, won't just be solved for the pure need of solving it, but it will be solved in a way that makes design more beautiful. It's a win win. And you are tackling head on these issues in your own brand. Can you tell us a little bit about the platform of your men's wear line? Brave Gentleman. Absolutely. Brave Gentleman started in two thousand ten. It emerged from a blog that I was writing called The Discerning Brute, where I was talking about men's where ethical men'shear vegan men's wear from um from this standpoint of masculine fashion and at the time in two thousand and eight when I started it, no one was really talking about it. When we heard about eco fashion, it was much more geared towards a fem audience. And I think that today we've seen a lot of strides made in UM. I mean, this is a whole other episode masculinity, masculinity and sustainability. Yeah, we could really get in deep with our our fragile masculine ideas of how we have to be brutal. But um I digress. So Brave Gentleman started in two thousand ten, and it's really it's become a proof of concept. I think I wanted to make things that I personally wanted that I didn't that didn't exist. I wanted really nice dress shoes that were classic and that didn't harm, didn't require the killing of an animal, and I wanted really fine tailored suiting that didn't require the sharing of a sheep. And up until I think my brand started, the perception of these quote unquote alternative materials was that they are cheap, and they are ugly, and they are uncomfortable. And I have been striving to find the most beautiful and luxurious and tactile materials to work with in Brave Gentleman, and I'm continually expanding upon the library of materials that I draw from. There are so many things I wish I could work with today that are not yet commercially available. Whether that is my silium leather being made from mushrooms, or the biosilk that's being synthesized um which is biologically identical to spider silk, or whether it's lab grown leather. It's coming soon, coming, all of these things. I mean, imagine there is a company Furroid that it's a biotech company that started up in Europe. They're growing pelts in the laboratory, like we imagine you're a designer and you want to have a customized pelt grown as the hair as long as you want, any color, you want, the skin as thick as you want, and no living animal is attached to it that I think, And it doesn't require a forest is cleared to let this animal greeze, and it doesn't require the the paradox of having to do something that is quite ugly to make something quite beautiful. Yeah, yeah, I was really impressed when I was in Australia recently. There's a sneaker company that's using the apple leather and the pineapple leather, and their shoes are super cute and I didn't have room from them in my bag, but I am following them on Instagram, and as soon as they start shipping to the US, I'm getting those like gold sneakers and apple leather and just so beautiful. The materials that we have the potential to use that are made from waste, that are made from everything from recycled fishing nets, like Eco nil is met is pulling fishing nets. People don't realize that the top contributor to ocean plastic pollution. It's not straws, it's not coffee lids, it's fishing nets. It's abandoned fishing nets. And so this company, Eco nil is taking all the fishing nets out of the ocean and recycling them into infinitely recyclable nylon. And it's that's circularity that we're looking for. So um there are companies that are coming up with all sorts of really visionary innovations. We are entering the next industrial revolution, I believe, and it's going to be all about biological materials, biosynthesis, biofabrication, and it's going to be about high tech recycling, and it's going to be about plant based organics. These mushroom leathers on these pineapple fibers and orange fiber. Have you seen this orange fiber? So the company in Italy is turning the waist of citrus peels into a cashmere like fiber. What it's really cool. Yeah, we could not agree more Joshua about how cool some of these new emerging textile products are. April and I both tumble down the rabbit hole a bit researching this orange fiber, and that's actually the name of the company, Orange Fiber. They are based in Italy and are using the waste by products from the juice industry, of all places, to create a citrus based cellulose fiber, which debuted on the market in two thousand fourteen. So cool, and since then it has been embraced by fashion brands, including Fergamo, who was the very first major fashion brand to use the fiber. And get this cast. Even H and M is using orange fiber now I know. For the last few years, H and M has been creating a smaller conscious collection which uses sustainable fibers like tens l lio cell and in their most recent Conscious Exclusive twenty nine team collection, Orange Fiber. Many of you wrote test last season following our Fashion and Sustainability episode, asking how to buy sustainably while on a budget. And while April and I certainly do not endorse fast fashion due to its obvious effect on the planet, we have to give H and M a nod for their efforts to begin to use sustainable materials. Although they do have a long way to go, this is certainly a step in the right direction. Yeah, I mean only if all of their um offering sustainable and also animal free. So a huge thank you to my friend, the ever amazing Joshua Catcher for joining us to talk about his book Fashion Animals, which is of course available on Amazon. Yes, thank you, Joshua, April. It is so clear how committed he is to the cause of animal rights, not only in his writing but his everyday life. I mean, Brave Gentleman is an entirely vegan brand, so no animal materials are used and its focus is also on sustainability. And as if that's not enough, he's also a vegan cheesemonger. He had me over a while back to prove that vegan cheeses are just as delicious as traditional cheeses, and he was right, you just kind of have to know what you're buying. So I stand corrected. Um. And since then, he's par laid his fashion for vegan cheese into a new venture called Rind and you can learn more about Rind at rind dot com. Okay, now I'm hungry, although I actually have never tried a vegan cheese, I'll have to check it out. That does it for Rest Today, Dress listeners, may you ponder the weighty issue of animals and fashion the next time you get dressed. Remember to tune in this Thursday for the latest edition of Fashion History Mystery, where we address questions from you are listeners. We love hearing from you, so if you like to email us, please do so Addressed at iHeart media dot com. 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