Visa has become the third major sponsor to exit Milan Fashion Week over fur, following DHL and Wella. With CAFT’s campaign intensifying and the corporate world pulling back, CNMI’s refusal to go fur-free is becoming harder to sustain.
Visa has ended its partnership with Milan Fashion Week. The global payments company became the third major corporate sponsor to cut ties with the Italian fashion showcase over its continued use of fur, following similar exits by DHL and Wella earlier this year. The departures are the product of a sustained pressure campaign by the Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade (CAFT), which launched its anti-fur offensive targeting Milan Fashion Week in January.
The Visa withdrawal came after 13 protests in a single week, staged at Visa headquarters and outside the homes of Visa executives in London, Munich, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Miami, Atlanta, and San Francisco — a geographic breadth that made the campaign impossible to dismiss. In an email to CAFT dated April 13, 2026, Europe correspondence from Visa Europe confirmed the decision directly: “Visa has ended its sponsorship of Milan Fashion Week.”
“We commend Visa for making the right decision to cut ties with Milan Fashion Week and Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana,” Suzie Stork, Executive Director of CAFT, said in a statement shared with Ethos. “Three major sponsors have now walked away from CNMI rather than be associated with cruel and outdated fur. The message could not be more clear. Milan Fashion Week’s refusal to go fur-free is a liability, and the corporate world knows it.”
Milan, the last major holdout
London and New York fashion weeks have banned fur from their runways, and Berlin, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam have also adopted fur-free policies. Milan, alongside Paris, has held its ground — but the corporate calculus around that decision is shifting fast. Fur production’s costs extend well beyond the ethical: producing one kilogram of mink fur generates greenhouse gas emissions seven times higher than one kilogram of beef and carries a carbon footprint 31 times that of cotton, according to Humane World for Animals. In 2025, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) determined that in the majority of cases, the major welfare harms inherent to cage-based fur farming cannot be substantially prevented or mitigated under the current system. Pelt prices, meanwhile, have collapsed — down 92 percent in sales value over the last decade. The European Commission has been assessing an EU-wide ban on fur farming; fur farming is already banned in 24 European countries, including 18 Member States.
Despite the mounting pressure, Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana (CNMI) and its president, Carlo Capasa, have not moved. Activists confronted Capasa at a talk at Bocconi University and again at the European Designer Fashion Summit in Barcelona on April 13, where he appeared on a panel alongside other European fashion industry leaders. CNMI has issued no fur-free policy, and CAFT has made clear that campaigns targeting the organization’s remaining partners will continue internationally until it does.
The sponsor strategy
The CAFT campaign is built on a specific pressure point: that corporate sponsors of fur-holding fashion weeks are complicit in funding the fur industry, and that stripping those sponsors away makes fur’s presence at fashion week economically untenable. Wella’s exit came in late January, after sustained protests at its studios in Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Munich, Warsaw, Paris, Toronto, and Fukuoka, and extended to demonstrations outside the Los Angeles homes of several Wella executives. DHL followed shortly after. Each departure narrows the financial and reputational runway Milan has left to hold its position, and puts whatever sponsors remain on notice that they are next to explain themselves.
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