Style Profile
Marc Bouwer gives new life to animal power
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is not known for its friendliness to the world of high fashion, what with fur as dominant as ever for the Fall/Winter collections and leather a ubiquitous component in everything from jackets to hand bags.
Since 2002, however, PETA has found its way into the tents at Bryant Park, and not in the form of pie-slinging protestors. 2002 marked the first year that designer Marc Bouwer debuted a collection entirely free of animal products, and his ideological commitment to cruelty-free clothing holds strong in his Fall 2007 collection, where his show brochure came enclosed with a full-page description of the veritable torture that befalls the creatures responsible for some of fashion’s most glamorous looks.
Many designers, perhaps rightly, fear that such a defiant stance would stigmatize them as activists and overshadow the actual clothing they create, but Bouwer faces that challenge head on. Never one to shy away from his message, Bouwer opened his show with a lush, ankle-length, white Siberian tiger coat, eliciting gasps from the audience due to the extreme realism of the entirely fake creation. His next two looks followed suit, parroting chinchilla and mink respectively, only to corroborate his long-held assertion that, given today’s technology, “you can’t tell the difference anymore” between what’s real and what’s imitation.
If anything, Bouwer continues, synthetic fabrics today have so much more longevity than the real stuff, it makes sense pragmatically to convert—that is, if you’re not already persuaded by the castration, bludgeoning, and deprivation Bouwer chronicles in almost explicit detail in his show pamphlet. “It’s horrifying what is done to animals in the name of fashion,” Bouwer earnestly declares.
Yet Bouwer remains resolute in his dedication to that solution, moving even outside of his design studio to propagate his animal-friendly mentality. Bouwer recently teamed up with Parsons The New School for Design to teach a junior class on how to design fur-free.
As someone whose career was significantly animated by the help of a mentor—fashion legend Roy Halston—it makes sense that Bouwer would seek to do the same for fashion’s up-and-coming generation of designers. After all, he may have devoted his life to creating it, but “fashion isn’t life,” Bower said. “It’s a luxury, not a necessity.” <