Humans don’t just exploit animals for food. The fashion industry has long been known to do cruel things to animals just to turn their skin or hair into products they can sell for lots of money. Many fashion brands have been waking up to the reality of just how cruel and unethical their practices are. Recently, Chanel banned fur and exotic animal skins, and Coach, Georgio Armani, Gucci, Michael Kors, Vivienne Westwood, Ralph Lauren, and Calvin Klein have all stopped using fur.

Unfortunately, many fashion designers are still making outdated, cruel products for the sake of money and appearances. French designer Thierry Mugler is known for using exotic animal skins to make clothing. He’s designed corsets, belts, and bags made of python leather and silk. Recently, celebrity Kim Kardashian who has in the past worn snakeskin pants and python boots, went to an evening talk show wearing a dress that has caught many people’s attention for being skintight. It is from Thierry Mugler’s 1983 vintage collection and is called the “snakeskin dress.” Could the dress Kim Kardashian wore be made of actual snakeskin?

To use snakeskin, as Mugler has in many designs, snakes are torn from their homes deep in the jungles of countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam. When captured, their heads are forced down and cut off with a machete, and because of their slow metabolisms, they remain conscious, feeling pain and fear for some time after being killed. If they are not beheaded, they are sometimes nailed to a tree and skinned alive, then thrown into piles of other snake bodies where they can take up to two days to die. The skin shed by snakes is too thin to use for fashion, so they are starved so that their skin loosens then pumped with water so that their skin stretches.

Thierry Mugler’s fashion designs and Kim Kardashian’s fashion choices represent animal cruelty in the fashion industry at it’s worst.

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