Sascha Camilli knows how to make fashion pay attention. At Milan Fashion Week in September 2023, the PETA campaigner interrupted Gucci’s catwalk to protest against the use of wild-animal skins—an intervention that travelled rapidly from the runway to social media. Today, however, some of her most potentially influential work is taking place away from the cameras, inside fashion classrooms.
Through its “Change the World With Your Wardrobe” lecture series, PETA is visiting universities across the UK and, more recently, Italy and the Netherlands. The aim is to reach fashion’s future designers, marketers, journalists and business leaders before the decisions they make begin shaping the industry.
“The attitude is completely different from when I was a fashion student,” Camilli reflects. “Things have shifted significantly. There is a sustainability module in pretty much every fashion course, whether we’re talking about fashion design, textile design, marketing, business or journalism.”
For Camilli, this growing interest reflects the urgency of the environmental challenges students will inherit. “The climate crisis is forcing fashion to look into this and answer these questions. It’s also creating an environment where the fashion industry professionals of the future are having to think about this. It opens the door for conversation. It makes students wonder, ‘What will my future career look like? What will my priorities be?’”
At the heart of the lectures is a challenge to some of fashion’s most deeply ingrained assumptions: that leather automatically signifies quality and luxury; that wool is natural, gentle and therefore sustainable; and that avoiding animal-derived materials inevitably means turning to fossil-fuel plastics.
PETA is asking students to look beyond animal skins and synthetic alternatives. Yet its most forward-thinking lesson is that no alternative material, whether made using cactus, mushrooms or other plant-derived ingredients can solve fashion’s environmental crisis unless the industry also learns to produce less.
Camilli’s enthusiasm for material innovation brings a sense of possibility into the classroom. “Mushroom leather has come such a long way just in my time at PETA. It now looks so leather-like,” she says. “Even Hermès did a bag from mushroom leather a few years ago. Karl Lagerfeld worked with cactus, Stella McCartney has used these materials and Balenciaga has also made a collection with Lunaform, which is a plant-derived vegan leather. So they are popping up.”
The adoption of next-generation materials by luxury houses matters because fashion does not choose materials solely for their practical qualities. It also determines what society considers beautiful, desirable and valuable. If the industry helped make animal skin synonymous with luxury, it also has the power to change that definition.
But every material has a much longer story before it becomes a garment. Behind the finished handbag, shoe or jumper are landscapes, animals, agricultural systems, water, energy and human labour. Many of these environmental and social consequences remain invisible to the consumer.
“The impacts are massive,” Camilli says. “We’ve heard so much about how animal agriculture affects the environment, and most people’s thoughts immediately go to the food chain and the meat industry, which is true, but it’s not the full story. Leather, wool and any kind of product that goes hand in hand with that industry are definitely part of it.”
She points towards the land required to graze animals or grow their feed, along with the associated loss of forests and biodiversity. “Sometimes us vegans get to hear that soy is bad for the environment, and it is very environmentally intensive, but most soy in the world is feed for farmed animals, which includes animals used for clothing and not just for meat.”
The environmental discussion around leather often concentrates on tanning, particularly the chemicals used during processing. Vegetable-tanned leather is frequently presented as a more environmentally responsible option, but Camilli argues that focusing on the tannery can obscure the impacts created while raising the animal itself.
The emotional and cultural familiarity of leather and wool can make these subjects difficult to discuss. Camilli has noticed a marked difference between public responses to campaigns against fur and exotic skins and those questioning materials found in everyday wardrobes.
“It’s so much easier for people to oppose them,” she explains. “Whenever we do a protest or any campaign against fur or wild skins, it’s met with such a positive reaction. But as soon as it’s wool and leather, it’s like, ‘No, that’s too extreme,’ because that requires people to actually give up something that is in their life.”
Reaching fashion students is one part of PETA’s work, but changing the behaviour of the wider public presents a different challenge. With people facing multiple overlapping crises, Camilli recognises that many feel overwhelmed rather than empowered.
“There’s so much going on in the world, and people are overwhelmed by all of the crises,” she says. “We have several different approaches when it comes to reaching out to people and educating them. It mainly tends to focus on undercover investigations that PETA entities do, because that is our best way to show what happens. It’s not always easy to get people to watch because it does not make for nice viewing.”
Alongside exposing the realities behind animal-derived materials, PETA presents alternatives so that people do not feel powerless. In universities, Camilli takes samples into the classroom, allowing students to see and touch some of the materials they might work with in the future. However, she is careful not to suggest that innovation alone can sustain the industry’s current levels of production and consumption.
“This is the key to everything,” she says. Students sometimes ask whether replacing all leather with cactus-based material would eventually create the same environmental pressures. “Your mind goes immediately to, ‘How do we take this and replace it?’ But what we need to do is actually make less of everything.”
It is this distinction that takes the lectures beyond a discussion about vegan leather. A more innovative raw material cannot compensate for endless growth, accelerating trend cycles and disposable clothing. Replacing one material with another while preserving the same volume of production leaves fashion’s underlying model intact.
When companies say that a new plant-derived material is difficult to scale, Camilli’s response is simple: “But we need to scale down.”
For fashion to become genuinely kinder to animals, people and the planet, the industry must do more than exchange one source of raw material for another. It must also change its relationship with clothes themselves: making fewer garments, valuing them more and teaching the next generation that creativity does not have to depend upon constant consumption.
“We just need to slow everything down,” Camilli concludes. “That’s the only way that fashion can ever be something that can exist on a liveable planet.”
