I’ve spent the last five years writing a book about animals in the fashion industry. Many major publishers expressed interest – from Taschen to Princeton Architectural Press to Fairchild… but they all wanted me to “tone down” the “political message” regarding animal rights. It turns out, they just wanted a pretty picture book using the gorgeous archival images that I’d painstakingly compiled. You know what I said to them? “No way!”
My name is Joshua Katcher, and I’ve been waiting my whole life to write this book. I don’t just want to report on what currently happens to animals caught up in the fashion industry, but I want to understand why people are so compelled to seek out animal-materials in fashion. No one has written a book dedicated to understanding animals in fashion, and I am so excited to provide this vital resource.
It’s 2018 and the scale of animal exploitation in fashion continues to grow. The fashion industry has an intentionally hidden history of staggering, global impacts on animals and the environment, from extinctions to massive industrial confinement and killing. Understanding why we are so drawn to animal materials in fashion is essential for change. That’s why I spent five years writing the only critical book on animals in fashion, compiling research, data and a spectacular archive of rare images.
Right now there are hundreds of millions of animals on fur farms, in industrial shearing operations and in line for slaughter so that the fashion industry can profit from their skins, hairs and feathers. With your pre-order, I will be able to publish FASHION ANIMALS with Vegan Publishers and shed light on an industry that is too often brushed off as something inconsequential. Far from being trivial, fashion has had enormous global impacts on animals and there is a riveting history of everything from extinctions to the use of animals as seductive symbols of power. With your help, we can get this essential book to people who need to see it.
This book can actually change the fashion industry by appealing to designers, creatives, fashion professionals and students. As a fashion designer and entrepreneur, and as an educator and lecturer at some of the top fashion universities in the world, my goal has been to create something that will inspire a major shift from inside the industry. I’m not trying to knock down the walls of the fashion world, I am walking right through the door and checking my coat! Using fascinating, historical images, painstaking research and telling forgotten or hidden stories, this book will not only make the case that it isn’t a matter of how animals are used in the fashion industry, it is a matter that they are used, but to also celebrate visionary innovations that could replace the use of animals altogether.
I can’t get a book like this into the hands that need it the most without your support. Please pre-order or contribute more and join this effort to rock the fashion industry with a startling, moving and visually stunning book.
The costs of designing, producing and shipping a big, beautiful, full-color book so extensive in its coverage are extremely high, and that’s why we need your help to produce it.
When you preorder, you’ll be one of the first people to have this important book. When you preorder more than one copy, you and your recipients will be drawn in by the imagery, and changed by the content. When you contribute even more, you are investing in a future that challenges the exploitation of animals in fashion.
If we don’t reach our goal, this book will not be published and these stories will not be told.
Given the high costs and our high aesthetic standards for design, if we don’t meet our goal, the book won’t be produced, so your help really does have the chance to make the book happen and thereby help protect animals. This is a book to leave out on your coffee table, to give as a gift, and to use as a strategic conversation piece. This is a book with which to teach, to strategize and to ponder.
With decades of experience in the mainstream, creative industries (from commercial video editing and television production to designing clothing, magazines, art and more) I am in a particularly relevant position of leverage to make a book like this effective and thereby, worth every penny.
Asking for help publicly is not something that comes easy for people like me: a chronic perfectionist, over-achiever and workaholic. In the fashion industry there is an expectation to appear as if everything is cool and collected, so asking for help shatters the illusion of flawlessness, and becomes some sort of admission of weakness. Regardless, I have swallowed my pride and I am here openly sharing the need for my community to help make this book a real, physical object that can be a tool for changing the world for animals.
If you’re unable to contribute, don’t feel bad. You can still help by spreading the word to some folks who might be able to. You can also help promote sales of the book, ask others to get it for you as a gift, or suggest me as a guest speaker or lecturer for you local events, classes or workshops.
Please use the Indiegogo share tools when spreading the word about this campaign!
I’ll leave you with the dedication I wrote for this book:
The fashion mausoleum may be spectacular, still and full of soft and exquisite things – but we mustn’t mistake the stillness for peace nor the softness for goodness. Despite the décor, there is little sympathy for fashion’s dead, nor mercy for its doomed. I dedicate this book to every animal whose body has vanished into a silent fashion object. You did not go quietly. You did not go prettily. You did not go willingly.
For the Animals,
Joshua Katcher
Joshua Katcher is a men’s lifestyle expert, crossfit level 1 trainer, instructor at Parsons, founder of eco-vegan fashion brand/ store Brave Gentleman, men’s’ conscious fashion website TheDiscerningBrute.com, and an ethical vegan who lives in Brooklyn with his husband and their rescue pets.