Unless you’re Chloe Malle, the new editorial director of Vogue, this is a terrible time to be an editor at the fashion magazine.
A local chapter of the Coalition To Abolish The Fur Trade, or CAFT, is protesting outside the homes of Condé Nast employees in an effort to end the coverage and promotion of fur in Vogue. Saying the disruption is loud doesn’t even begin to cover it.
This style of demonstration, the most recent one on Wednesday night in Clinton Hill, has been a tactic used by CAFT for about a year. The group hopes for a formal agreement to stop the usage and promotion of fur from executives, which they have yet to receive.
“The fur industry is at a really low point right now," said Suzie Stork, a Brooklynite and an executive director at CAFT. "It's completely unnecessary, too. A lot of people view fur as a luxury item. It's not accessible to a lot of people. There's a lot of real suffering behind it."
Vogue is probably one of the most influential fashion magazines in the world and they are responsible for bolstering the fur industry by allowing models to pose in fur, she added.
On Wednesday, CAFT members made their way to the home of Vogue Deputy Editor Taylor Antrim in Clinton Hill with megaphones, bullhorns and posters.
“Taylor Antrim burn in hell,” they chanted while neighbors came outside to disapprove.
“He has nothing to do with the fashion [aspect] or what goes into the magazine,” said a neighbor, who remained anonymous. The neighbor claimed that Antrim was not home at the time of the protest, but the CAFT protest witnessed multiple people watching the demonstration from the safety of the Antrim home.
Liesbet Van Leemput, another neighbor on the block, said that she has witnessed these recent demonstrations multiple times and that there can sometimes be altercations between the demonstrators and passersby.
Officers from the New York City Police Department rolled onto the scene of the protest around 8:00pm. Stork said that she was told to put away the megaphones due to sound permit laws. The group stayed steady in their volume regardless, with chants like “No more traps, no more cages. No more fur on Vogue pages,” and “Taylor and Vogue sitting on a tree K-I-L-L-I-N-G.”
“Hopefully the neighbors are complaining to Taylor Antrim or the editors' homes that we visit, and that'll pressure them to [speak] out for the company,” said Stork.
CAFT members have hit other Vogue editors' homes in Williamsburg and Brooklyn Heights, as the address of editors can be easily found on the internet.
"It's all public information. A lot of these people also have public Instagram profiles," said Stork, whose group has no plans to stop this type of protest until it receives a resolution from Condé Nast.
Some high profile New Yorkers, including the heads of the Brooklyn Museum and the executive director of the New York Times, have also been targeted by unrelated protesters in recent months.
Stork told BK Reader that Vogue and Condé Nast have issued a cease and desist letter to the group.
“They're trying to prevent us from, you know, exercising our First Amendment rights and protesting. CAFT does not back down to that,” she said, adding that the letter was a corporate scare tactic.
Representatives from Condé Nast and Taylor Antrim did not respond to requests for comment.
