Month: December 2024

Designers must commit to ditching skins of animals such as crocodiles and snakes from 2025…reports Asian Lite News

London fashion week has become the first of the four main fashion weeks to ban exotic animal skins from shows from 2025 – the biggest industry event to do so. 

All designers staging fashion shows at the event will have to commit to ditching skins of animals such as crocodiles, alligators and snakes from their collections. The ban was announced by the British Fashion Council’s deputy director for policy and engagement, David Leigh-Pemberton, in a speech to parliament this week. 

The move follows the ban on fur, which was first promised by the BFC’s chief executive, Caroline Rush, in 2018, and formally put in place in December 2023. Within the “big four” fashion weeks – New York, London, Milan and Paris – the British capital has been more progressive when it comes to animal materials. London was the first to ban fur and is now the first to ban exotic skins, and follows smaller but increasingly influential events such as Melbourne fashion week and Copenhagen fashion week. By contrast, fur is still seen at shows in Milan and Paris. 

Animal rights campaigners welcomed the development. “We celebrate this important progress,” said Emma Håkansson, the founding director of Collective Fashion Justice. Dr Charlotte Regan, a wildlife campaign manager at World Animal Protection UK, said the announcement sent an “important message throughout the global fashion industry that exploiting animals for their skins is both unethical and unnecessary. 

“Millions of animals continue to suffer and die for fashion when there are so many innovative and exciting animal-friendly materials designers and clothing companies can choose to create with instead.” 

Animal rights campaigners would also like to see a ban of feathers, which are sometimes “live-plucked” from birds, causing pain and distress. Regan said: “With both fur and now wild animal skins banned from London fashion week, our attention turns to the use of wild bird feathers in fashion. We look forward to working with the British Fashion Council on the last step of their journey to being a completely wildlife-free event.” 

Copenhagen fashion week announced in April that it would ban feathers from its shows from 2025. London fashion week is heavily dominated by emerging designers so the ban may be easier for it to implement, according to the Business of Fashion website, as it is “the leather goods powerhouses that more often use exotic [skins] in their collections”. 

Feathers are perhaps a trickier proposition because they are used so frequently by designers as trimming on clothing. It is also harder to ascertain real from faux. In 2023, it was discovered that retailers including Boohoo and Selfridges had mislabelled real feathers as faux. 

A press statement from the British Fashion Council described the ban as part of a wider package of standards under the organisation’s Institute of Positive Fashion which works across social, environmental and sustainability programmes, partly to reflect the changing feelings of the fashion industry in London. 

“We know that many of our designers have strong ethics and are working towards more sustainable practices and accurate measurement,” it read. “We are committed to providing our network with tools and resources to help them on this journey. As part of this, discussions are taking place around the use of feathers on the catwalk.” 

ALSO READ: UK, US, France, Germany urge ‘de-escalation’ in Syria 

Dr Jamie Ingram, who is heading a major project to study graffiti in the Tower of London, described the discoveries as “exciting”..reports Asian Lite News

The writing was on the wall for many of the prisoners incarcerated in the Tower of London over the centuries. Now, it can finally be deciphered. 

Hundreds of graffiti texts scratched into the historic stone walls by prisoners as they awaited their fate have come to light for the first time. Examples that were either overlooked or illegible are emerging through cutting-edge technology. 

Dr Jamie Ingram, who is heading a major project to study graffiti in the Tower of London, described the discoveries as “exciting”. He began studying the Salt Tower on the south-eastern corner – part of the curtain wall that Henry III built in the 1230s. Its prisoners included Hew Draper, a Bristol innkeeper accused of practising sorcery and imprisoned in 1561, who carved an astrological sphere with zodiacal signs into the wall, despite having claimed that he had destroyed all his magical books. No record exists of his fate. 

Ingram told the Observer: “There were supposed to be 79 examples of graffiti there, according to the historic survey. By the end of the survey that I conducted, there are 354. Very fine viewing of the surface of the walls has allowed us to identify what else is there … acknowledging that every mark is important, rather than just those that have been left by the famous prisoners.” 

The Tower of London, a secure fortress and royal palace, has held prisoners including the two princes, Edward V and Richard Duke of York, Anne Boleyn, her daughter Princess Elizabeth, and Guy Fawkes. Today it is managed by Historic Royal Palaces, an independent charity, which Ingram joined last year specifically to research one of the UK’s most significant collections of historic graffiti. 

The latest technology, which includes raking light, laser scanning and X-ray analysis, has never been applied at the Tower before. “Light shone off at an angle … enhances the creation of shadows on that surface and lets us really see the detail,” Ingram said. “As soon as we bring these modern methodologies to bear on it, things start to change quite dramatically, and suddenly we can actually start to read it.” 

One section of a wall bears graffiti by possibly three hands. The dates 1571 and 1576 are also inscribed. These had been listed as “illegible”, but are now being deciphered. While the complete texts have not survived, certain words can be picked out. 

One of the passages seems to be in Breton and may well have been written by a woman. There are references to a “husband”, as well as honour and rivers. Ingram said: “We haven’t got any specific records of female prisoners in that tower. This is possibly a woman’s voice, which is incredibly rare in the graffiti, and the first example we’ve got in the Salt Tower itself. 

“We know that there were women at the tower. They’re just not represented in these physical first-person records. This is a rare primary record of a woman’s presence, whether she’s a prisoner herself or the wife of the prisoner.” 

Most of the graffiti is pictorial, including crosses, which reflect that “a lot of religious prisoners [were] held in this space,” he said. Most of the texts are relatively short and include biblical passages. 

Funding for the graffiti study has been made available by a private donor. . Ingram will next focus on the Byward Tower, at the south-west corner of the complex. He said: “There’s some amazing graffiti in there that’s going to allow us to ask some more questions.” 

But he expressed dismay that today’s visitors are adding their own: “If they’re doing it with a pen or pencil, there’s no evidence that it’s being done until it’s too late. Where we can, we clean it off [but] it gets into the stone and damages it. It’s horrifying that they’re doing it on a monument so significant to us.” 

ALSO READ: UK, US, France, Germany urge ‘de-escalation’ in Syria 

A recent YouGov poll had one-fifth of Londoners choose “dirty” as one of their main descriptors of the capital. …reports Asian Lite News

As councils stretch budgets to cover the costs of housing and social care, what happens to the other areas they are responsible for? Collecting the bins, cleaning and lighting the streets and filling potholes are among the most immediately visible metrics against which a council is judged. 

A recent YouGov poll had one-fifth of Londoners choose “dirty” as one of their main descriptors of the capital. One professor has even called it the “grotification” of London and said unclean, grimy streets are spreading across the capital. 

As Havering Council’s leader, Ray Morgon said, everyone wants to live in a clean, safe borough. But with 70% of the budget going towards social care and housing services, other areas are thinly stretched. “It means those discretionary services now are a smaller proportion of our overall budget – and as a result there has been a decline. 

Havering Council has introduced a volunteer scheme to tackle “grot spots”, he said. “We’re looking at ways to try and stop the decline, but we are also looking to our residents to help us to do that.” 

Prof Tony Travers, an expert in local national government at the London School of Economics, coined the term “grotification” – meaning the declining standards of cleanliness of our streets. “Most people feeling that if the streets, parks and gardens they live in are scruffy and not properly cared for, they don’t feel good” Prof Travers said. 

“If we look at the cuts to local government funding, social care has to be protected – everything else including street cleaning, weeding, graffiti cleaning, has taken a much deeper cut, up to half in some cases. “That means our neighbourhoods look less good and that affects our pride of place”. 

Leader of Croydon Council Jason Perry said the authority was trying to tackle the problem with schemes such as a new – more efficient – streetlight contract. 

Julia Neden-Watts from Richmond Council said one of her concerns about keeping the streets clean was the increase in national insurance, which would make contractors more expensive for councils. At the moment businesses pay a rate of 13.8% on employees’ earnings above a threshold of £9,100 a year. 

In the Budget Chancellor Rachel Reeves said this rate would increase to 15% in April 2025, and the threshold would be reduced to £5,000. So Neden-Watts said Richmond was looking to work “smarter”. 

“It’s about where you can invest to save. The more reuse, the more recycling, the less we have to spend on collecting and disposing of rubbish. “We can end up finding some positives [in the funding gap] but it’s hard work.” 

ALSO READ: UK property market surges