DEMOS AND CHAOS AT MAXMARA SPONSORED EVENT (ITALY)

During the week from july 20th to the 26th in Riccione, a famous town on the italian seaside, took place a fashion show called “Riccione Moda Italia”. This show is mostly a contest for young fashion students, where people of 500 italian schools are invited to partecipate with their designs. The finalists will be in Riccione and will see their clothings on the catwalk of the saturday night party.
The finalists are divided in 6 categories, including swimming wear, pret-a-porter, lingerie and so on, but what makes this event important for us is the “fur” category. This is sponsored by the Italian Fur Association (AIP) and the winner will receive 1000 euros, finding also a job in some company of this bloody industry. This is a notable event for the furriers, and they invest a lot of money into it, because RMI is the most important contest for fashion students and reaches thousands of them with their message that fur is just one catoegory as the others, inviting them to work in this industry and use fur for their fashion ideas.
Being Italy the country of fashion you can understand how important it is for us that it goes fur-free, taking off the fur section and stopping to promote the use of fur among fashion students.

Riccione Moda Italia took place for 17 years without any problem, but in 2008 the organization has been contacted asking to remove the fur section. It was too late to make any big change in the contest, but
we managed to obtain a workshop with all the 30 finalists about fur, which went really well. This was what we agreed for last year, asking to have talks on removing the fur section from this year on.
Being their reply negative on this year’s edition, we refused any offer for another workshop with students and decided to pass on portests. Even if it is good to speak to 30 students, we find it a lot more important to avoid the pro-fur message reaching thousands more in all schools.

For two days on july 24th and 25th we took the streets of Riccione with a lot of angry and determined demos in front of the city council and the local tourist palace (both of them financing the event), in front of the Villa where the week of events were taking place, a funny march on the seashore among people having sunbath and then a
demo during the final catwalk. We also had time to do a 40 strong demo at the local Max Mara store, being MMFG not only under an international campaign, but themselves one of the main sponsors of this event!

The highlight of these days of demos was on saturday evening, when the demo at the final show turned into a big mess while fur was on the catwalk. A lot of activists run from the demo to the Villa, the police began scuffles, shouts could be heard, activists were punched in front of hundreds of people and in the middle of all this one activist managed to jump inside the Villa garden and try to reach the catwalk… he has been stopped before reaching it, but the chaos was great and continued for a while, ruining completely the atmosphere of the event.

A lot of press covered this demo the days after and leaving the town we were sure that we left a clear message for the organizers, for the city council sponsoring it, and also for Max Mara, represented there by Laura Lusuardi, fashion coordinator of the company since a lot of years, one of those persons that could have a voice on stopping the use of fur for their collections.

CAMPAGNA AIP