New Documentary Uncovers Fashion Industry’s Shocking Use of Animals
The eye-opening film ‘SLAY’ exposes greenwashing, mislabelling, and animal cruelty from some of the world’s major luxury fashion brands.
Credit: SLAY
Investigative filmmaker Rebecca Cappelli spent three years uncovering the secrets behind how the fashion industry operates, and now her eye-opening journey has been made into a feature-length documentary.
The new film, SLAY, focuses on the use of animal skins in fashion, and reveals a harrowing story of greenwashing, mislabelling, animal cruelty and cover-ups, from some of the world’s major luxury fashion brands.
From the producer of Cowspiracy and What the Health, SLAY hopes to educate consumers on the dark reality of the fashion industry, and how it harms animals, human workers, and the planet too.
And its investigations into the fur, leather, and wool industries reveal the overwhelming scale of animal cruelty. For example, the fur trade is estimated to breed and kill around 100 million young animals every single year, in order to produce the likes of fur coats, hats and scarfs.
The documentary also tackles the widespread practise of ‘greenwashing’ - a term used to refer to brands which attempt to make people believe that a company is doing more to protect the environment than it really is.
The leather industry is one such industry accused of ‘greenwashing’, as the industry is said to market animal-skin leather as a so-called ‘natural material’, despite its destructive impact on the workers, land, and animals. The film investigates leather tanneries, where animal skins are treated in chemical solutions to stop the skins decaying. But this process is often extremely harmful to the low-paid workers and is environmentally destructive too.
Studies show that the production of synthetic leather and next-gen plant-based materials like mirum and mushroom-leather, is said to have a fraction of the CO2 emissions compared to cow skin leather.
“The fashion industry is not addressing animal suffering in their supply chain”, the film’s director, Rebecca Cappelli said in a statement. “We have an urgent moral obligation to respond to the suffering of hundreds of millions of individuals in the fashion industry, as animal rights and sustainability are intimately linked. We want SLAY to open people’s eyes to the dark underbelly of some of the most common and sought-after skins in fashion.”
Watch SLAY Online Now - For Free
You can watch SLAY online for free via the streaming platform, WaterBear Network. The no-cost and ad-free streaming service has been dubbed “Netflix for the planet”, and features short films, stories and feature-length documentaries that cover environmental issues.
Ellen Windemuth, CEO and founder of WaterBear Network, said “our platform and streaming service helps activists, brands, consumers and NGOs to deliver on their sustainability initiatives. It’s vital to have powerful documentaries like SLAY on our platform to engage consumers and drive change in the fashion industry.”
Want more on the future of fashion? Check out some of our favorite animal-free leather alternatives here and learn more about next-gen materials by listening to our podcast episode with Sydney Gladman, the chief scientific officer at Material Innovation Initiative (MII), and Ranjani Theregowda, MII’s environmental data scientist here.
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