BAFTA Host Alan Cumming Urges Attendees to Choose Vegan Leather
Alan Cumming – actor, activist, and host of the 2026 BAFTA Film Awards – has appeared in a new PETA billboard urging people to ditch animal skins.
The billboard appeared just a stone’s throw away from London’s Royal Festival Hall, where the ceremony will take place this Sunday (22 February). It urges attendees to be a rebel with a cause and only wear vegan leather. The campaign puts a sexy, vegan twist on the iconic image of Marlon Brando in The Wild One, and features Cumming as the alluring outlaw rebelling against cruel unsustainable animal skins.
In the shot, Cumming wears a cactus leather jacket by All Saints, vegan leather Dr Martens boots, and a vegan leather cap – proving that vegan leather is not only more sustainable and ethical than animal skin, but also very much in the mainstream and used by high-profile and innovative brands.
“You can be sexy and powerful wearing vegan leather. I’ve done it. It’s so much cooler to be a rebel with a cause. The dairy and meat industry is incredibly damaging to our planet and to the well-being of animals. There’s loads of plant-based materials that are available today in clothes of all sorts, so there’s absolutely no need to be wearing leather.” – Alan Cumming.
Vegan Leather Is Superior
Cows are gentle animals who have friends and mourn when a loved one dies. Their skin is their own, and humans have no right to turn them into handbags, belts, and coats. On farms, they are denied everything that is natural to them – they are packed into filthy barns, shackled, beaten, and separated from their babies.
Leather is a lucrative co-product of the meat industry, which is one of the world’s biggest polluters and contributors to the climate crisis. Tanneries – which use formaldehyde, coal-tar derivatives, cyanide-based dyes, and other dangerous chemicals – are notorious for polluting nearby water and soil.
Sustainable vegan leathers – including those made from apple peels, pineapple leaves, cork, mushrooms, and other plant materials – are just as durable and fashionable without the cruelty or environmental destruction of leather.
Cumming has previously posed naked as ‘the vegan option’, handed out free vegan ice cream at the Edinburgh Fringe, spoken out against a proposed caviar farm in Scotland, and called for Glasgow’s COP26 to be a vegan event.
Thank you, Alan Cumming, for your unstoppable commitment to animals!
Remove Leather from Your Wardrobe
Want to remove all animal skin from your wardrobe today? Check out our picks of some of the best sustainable vegan leathers money can buy:
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