PETA’s Impact on Fashion: How a Norfolk Charity is Changing Global Brands
PETA SVP Dan Mathews will explain how the organization has gone from outside agitator to fashion insider. Mathews, whose provocative protests led to top designers dropping fur, now works with them in Milan, Paris and New York to help their companies meet the increasing demand for vegan materials replacing leather, exotic skins and wool. Read more on this fashion blog: https://cfda.com/news/how-peta-became-a-sustainability-resource
How can a serious cause compete for attention in a society hungrier for entertainment than education? With provocative campaigns that use sex, celebrities, and humor, just as an ad agency does. Dan Mathews is the irreverent force behind many of PETA's edgy crusades and star-studded stunts. His brainstorms, such as the iconic "Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur" campaign, routinely make global news. Among his many accomplishments are the following: He persuaded Calvin Klein to stop using fur after leading a raid on the designer's office and pressured General Motors to stop using animals in crash tests by storming the company's auto shows. His multimedia campaigns helped push Ringling Bros. circus to close in 2017, after 146 years in business, and SeaWorld to stop breeding orcas in captivity in 2016. He served lunch to prisoners at America's first vegetarian jail in Phoenix and organized the first Vegan Gumbo Festival in New Orleans. He's been named one of America's most influential gays by Out magazine, and in 2016, he was presented with an "Activist of the Year" award by Vivienne Westwood in London. He started at PETA in 1985 as the young organization's receptionist, but the pop-culture junkie soon rose through the ranks, devising whimsical campaigns to increase public awareness of animal issues—such as infiltrating a fur designer's fashion show in Milan dressed as a priest. He recruited stars—including Paul McCartney, Pamela Anderson, P!nk, and Alec Baldwin—to put PETA on people's pop-culture radar. "Mathews' greatest insight is his seemingly intuitive … understanding that causes are as much about trendiness as they are about conscience," wrote New York magazine. His memoir, Committed, was published in the U.S. by Atria in 2007 and has since been published in Australia and across Europe. "Mathews believes in the spoonful-of-sugar approach to enlightenment, letting personal, gossipy, often hilarious anecdotes illuminate hot-button issues," wrote The Washington Post. His columns have appeared in USA Today, The Guardian, and Huffington Post, and he's lectured at Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, and his alma mater, American University in Washington, D.C.
