The Council of Fashion Designers of America has spent the past year arguing that NYFW is ready to lead on animal welfare. Its president responded to that argument, in person, by physically restraining the activists making it.
At least five PETA activists stormed the runway show of COS, the H&M Group-owned label, at New York Fashion Week on Sunday where Steven Kolb, president and chief executive of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, personally engaged two of them, tearing protest signs out of their hands, covering their mouths, and wrapping his legs around one of them to pin her to the floor while models kept walking, according to video footage captured during the show. The audience watching from the seats included Sharon Stone, Michelle Williams, and Lupita Nyong’o.
“I reacted inappropriately to an incident at a show earlier today,” Kolb wrote on his Instagram Stories after the show. “It wasn’t my place to do so. I should have let the security team handle the situation.” Today, CFDA placed him on leave, saying that “the CFDA takes this matter very seriously, and as a result, Mr. Kolb will be on leave pending a full review.”
Kolb wasn’t disrupting a random heckler, though. He physically shut down protesters making the same argument the CFDA has spent the past year making on its own behalf — that fashion can move past animal cruelty once consumers demand it. “Consumers are moving away from products associated with animal cruelty, and we want to position American fashion as a leader,” Kolb said, on what he described as sustainability and animal-welfare grounds, when the CFDA announced its fur ban last December.
The ban prohibits farmed or trapped fur from mink, fox, rabbit, karakul lamb, chinchilla, coyote, and raccoon dog on the official NYFW schedule (with an exception for Indigenous subsistence hunting). It says nothing about wool, which is what the two activists Kolb restrained were there to raise. By the time the ban took effect, PETA’s investigation tying a wool supplier to one of the CFDA’s own official-schedule brands had already been public for months.
PETA’s focus on wool predates this runway by six years. In 2020, the organization ended its three-decade “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur” campaign, with PETA Senior Vice President Dan Mathews telling reporters that the fur trade had already entered a “downward spiral” — designers dropping it, California banning it, fur auction houses filing for bankruptcy — and that PETA was redirecting its energy toward leather and wool instead.
In April, PETA released its 17th undercover investigation into wool operations across seven countries, this one into a farm in South Africa that the organization said sells wool through a broker supplying H&M Group, COS’s parent company, with fleece the retailer markets as responsibly sourced. The farm held both NATIVA and Textile Exchange’s Responsible Wool Standard certification — the same kind of credentialing the industry points to when it calls wool responsibly sourced. PETA’s footage showed workers kicking sheep in the head and body, striking them with shearing equipment, and dragging lambs by their front legs. The cruelty documented under a certified “responsible” label is indistinguishable from the category of harm CFDA’s leadership argument was built to address for fur.
“Every PETA investigation into wool entities around the world has exposed that terrified sheep are routinely beaten, kicked, and sliced to pieces,” PETA President Tracy Reiman said in a statement last April.
H&M Group’s most recent annual sustainability report notes that 91 percent of the materials in its commercial products are recycled or sustainably sourced, but it does not define what counts as sustainably sourced wool specifically, and the report does not name the Responsible Wool Standard or any other third-party animal-welfare certification.
PETA said it plans to file a police report against Kolb and is weighing criminal charges over what it called an assault on two of its activists, according to CNN. One of them, Mason Melito, a 22-year-old PETA senior campaigner who said he did not know Kolb’s identity until after he was removed from the show, told CNN he still wants to speak with Kolb directly about the industry the restraint was defending.
“The violence the CEO of the CFDA showed toward us, in his attempt to silence us, just completely mirrors the violence inherent in the wool industry,” Melito told CNN. “What we really want to do is talk to Mr. Kolb.”
Related on Ethos:
