NOTE: This news release was originally published by peta.org.uk on September 20, 2024.
Pinaucchio Image Revealed Ahead of Milan Fashion Week Showcase
Milan – On the day of Gucci’s Spring/Summer 2025 show at the Triennale in Milan, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) unveiled its new ad targeting Gucci’s parent company, Kering, in front of the show entrance. Calling out the company’s use of wild-animal skins, the ad depicts CEO François-Henri Pinault as Pinocchio, a reference to Pinault’s unkept promise – made at Kering’s annual meeting in April – to “collaborate” with PETA to end the slaughter of pythons used for its accessories.
Photos and videos from the action are available here.
“Every belt or bag made from an animal’s skin represents the pain and suffering of a terrified individual who didn’t want to die,” says PETA Vice President for Europe Mimi Bekhechi. “PETA is calling on Monsieur Pinault to quit making empty promises and get wild-animal skins out of his group’s collections – including Gucci’s – as so many other luxury brands have already done.”
On two python farms in Thailand that supply skins to the Kering-owned tannery Caravel, PETA Asia investigators documented that emaciated and sick pythons were housed in such deprived conditions that a reptile expert condemned their treatment as inhumane. Workers bashed pythons on the head with hammers, impaled them on hooks, pumped their bodies full of water as they continued to move, and then skinned them. An investigation into a slaughterhouse in Indonesia that confirmed it supplied lizard skin to Kering revealed that workers decapitated and dismembered the animals using machetes. Gucci was also implicated in a PETA US investigation into ostrich-slaughter companies, which found that workers forced birds into stun boxes and slit their throats in full view of their flockmates.
PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow the group on Facebook, X, TikTok, or Instagram.
Contact:
Sascha Camilli +44 20 7923 6244; SaschaC@peta.org.uk
