Normal Gets You Nowhere, Kelly Cutrone [self help books to read TXT] 📗

disseminate messages we wanted to send to multiple media outlets at once. Now, thanks to my multitiered platform—television and books—my company has the ability to reach over a hundred thousand people on Twitter, for free. I don’t know about you, but I love having the ability to disseminate news straight to the people from my BlackBerry.

For example: I happen to think that, despite what industry insiders might tell you, it’s absolutely gross that fashion people are still celebrating fur. What is so sexy about the annihilation of animals for clothing? I don’t know what time period these people think we’re living in. I feel the media have mistakenly portrayed fur as glamorous, when it is actually disgusting with a capital D. In fact, I was appalled when several prominent news organizations recently touted Naomi Campbell’s hot sexy new fur campaign. Thanks to Twitter, I was able to instantly rebuff them by Tweeting that, if they think fur’s sexy, they should show pictures of the animals being clubbed to death or perhaps with electrodes in their mouths or stuck up their anuses. (These are common practices to ensure the fur will lie perfectly on a coat.) Then we’ll see how sexy it is. I was happy to know that a hundred thousand plus people read my message within minutes. And soon, hundreds of young people were even agreeing with me and re-Tweeting it.

I actually think that fur is a great lens through which to talk about commerce, publicity, fame, and the media—and how they all reinforce and rely on each other. Just like with political bills and Happy Meals (trust me, there is nothing happy about how that meal was made), the information about fur is already out there; everything relevant has been said. Take a minute out of your day to visit the website of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, PETA.org—I mean, just one minute, I beg you! View some videos of minks in their cages, suffering with open wounds and engaging in stress-induced cannibalism, or foxes with their legs stuck in traps, literally gnawing them off in terror. If you still think fur is sexy, then you should fucking take a ticket straight to hell and meet your other friends.

But denial is a dangerous drug. People have been programmed not to dig a little deeper to find out why they think something’s sexy. In the comfortably numb generation, we think that seeing something on the news makes it true and that seeing something in the pages of our favorite fashion magazine makes it glamorous. And let’s face it, fur’s publicists have been doing a brilliant job for decades, selling fur to us via Davy Crockett, Dr. Zhivago, J. Lo, and other fur-wearing celebrities. (I’m literally on the Internet as I write this, trying to find a picture of someone who actually looks sexy in fur, but to me they all look like they’re going to a screening of The Flintstones. If you want to look prehistorically ignorant, I recommend you run out and buy yourself a rabbit vest immediately.)

Often, fur trade associations befriend fashion designers when they’re still in design school. They start by providing free fur, and later they pay them to use fur. Do you think I’m joking? I’ve literally had clients show pink mink gouchos in their summer collections. I’ll ask them why they’re doing this, only to find out they’re being paid $10,000 by a fur company to use fur! (That’s right, this shit is so ugly that its manufacturers have to pay to get it on the runway!) I hate to break it to you, but if you think fur’s glamorous, it doesn’t mean you have fabulous taste; it means you’ve been programmed to be totally numb to suffering.

Not that I blame you. I remember wanting a fur coat when I was growing up in Syracuse, in the Eskimo tundra of upstate New York. It always seemed like that’s just what you wore to keep warm if you were rich and glamorous and that any good husband would eventually buy you one (of course, where I was from, even a rabbit stole was considered fancy). When I started representing fashion designers, I was given what I thought was a fabulous reversible flying fox coat by one of my clients. At the time, it was considered chic to bleach the fur and then dye the tips, so my coat was white with ombré hunter green accents. I wore it on a business trip to Sweden to visit a client; wrapped in it as I deplaned, I remember thinking how in the game I was. Never mind that Sweden is one of the most understated places on earth, and wearing a massive fur coat with ombré hunter green accents to Stockholm is like showing up in a Dior ball gown to a picnic. Despite wearing the only fur coat in the entire city, I still felt hot, not ridiculous.

I found out what’s really going on in the fur industry from Dan Mathews, now vice president of PETA, whom I met early on in my time in New York. He visited me at Cutrone & Weinberg, my first PR firm, because he wanted me to know how fur was made. I thought he was a bit outlandish. After all, my impression of charities at the time was that they were supposed to be nice. PETA was attention-seeking and aggressive; at one point the organization even occupied the corporate headquarters of Calvin Klein until Calvin himself agreed to stop making furs.

But I didn’t become antifur immediately. It took a few years for me to actually take ten minutes out of my busy day and spend some time looking into the industry. When I did, and when I saw some videos of what actually happens to these animals, I realized I could no longer get behind it. At first it was very personal; I just wouldn’t wear fur myself. But as I later took my daughter shopping