Environment

Is that dog fur you're wearing?

by djexelta | February 23, 2007 at 07:24 am

501 views | 5 Recommendations | 1 comment

The Dothan Eagle is the main newspaper in Dothan Alabama, so it is something strange that it would be running a story about fashion designers using dog fur to adorn jackets being sold at upscale department stores like Nordstrom.

O wait - this is a story from AP, to which the venerable Dothan Eagle subscribes. Never mind - the story is still something of a shocker:

The Humane Society of the United States said it purchased coats from reputable outlets, such as upscale Nordstrom, with designer labels - Andrew Marc, Tommy Hilfiger, for example - and found them trimmed with fur from domestic dogs, even though the fur was advertised as fake.

"It's an industrywide deception," said Kristin Leppert, the head of the Human Society's anti-fur campaign.

The investigation began after the society got a tip from a consumer who bought a coat with trim labeled as faux fur that felt real. Leppert and her team began buying coats from popular retailers and then had the coats tested by mass spectrometry, which measures the mass and sequence of proteins, to determine what species of animal the fur came from.